After just a year and a half,
it is virtually impossible by any measure to see the regime of Barack
Obama as anything other than a failure. Elected on lofty rhetoric
espousing the nebulous agenda of change, hope, prosperity and unity, his
first, only, and hopefully truncated term in office has turned into a
cold, clammy, national nightmare.

On transparency:
Failure. His promises of transparency would be pretty comical if
his collection, misuse and withholding of information wasnít so
dangerous. Threatening to sue media organizations for negative
campaign reporting, soliciting snitches to report on health care
opponents, attacking those in the press corps for asking tough questions
and claiming Fox isnít news are but a few examples of his attitude
towards information. If that wasnít enough, he has told both high
school and college graduates that information can be dangerous.
Not the way it is used or misused, but the information itself.

On the economy: Utter, abject failure. The results of
Obamaís multiple efforts at "stimulating" the economy through
redistributing wealth, instead of increasing it have been dismal at
best. Unemployment has barely budged, consumer confidence sucks
and thousands more layoffs are on the horizon with the end of the
census, the evaporation of stinkulus cash and changes to capital gains
taxes in 2011. At a frightening 90 percent of GDP, the sum of our
entire economic output is now comprised almost entirely of government
debt, the lionís share of which was incurred in just the last year and a
half. The only way out of the hole is drastically higher taxes
which Obama will likely enact beginning in 2011 under the political
cover of his deficit-reduction committee.

On health care:
Failure. I donít care how many people will gain health insurance
under Obamaís health care plan. That isnít the proper measure of
success. At what cost? If it bankrupts the country, hurts
scientific research, results in doctor shortages or less quality care
and if the entire country has to shoulder the economic burden of deals
that were concocted against their will, behind locked doors, using
bribes, trickery, arm-twisting and disinformation, then it is a failure.
Period.

On national security: Failure. American
blood has been spilled on American soil multiple times under Barack
Obama already. There have been several attacks and multiple
failures of intelligence that were near-misses that could have been
disastrous had it not been for faulty devices or inexperience.
Every effort Obama has made to, as he said in his inaugural address,
"reach out our hand, if you will unclench your fist" has been met with
scorn, recalcitrance or outright hostility. The world is a much
more dangerous place as a result of Obamaís lack of leadership.

On foreign policy: Failure. Bowing to dictators and
foreign heads of state was an enormous mistake. It did not command
respect, rather screamed weakness. Sensing this weakness, North
Korean tantrums have increased, culminating recently in the sinking of a
South Korean vessel which killed 46 amid continued vows of all-out war
in response to international punishment.

Despite his past claims
that Israel had no better friend, Obama has turned his back on the
Israelis. Who can forget his ill-mannered snub at Benjamin
Netanyahu a few months ago? How about Turkey? Turkey has not
been a reliable ally for many years and should be thrown out of NATO
altogether. They supplied thugs for the flotilla that ran the
Israeli blockade. Along with Brazil, they were the only two
council members to vote against a UN Security Council resolution
penalizing Iran, yet, Barack Obama rewarded this intransigence with
verbal assurances that he backed UN inquiry into Israelís blockade,
setting a dangerous precedent which may open the door to future UN
inquiries of US anti-piracy efforts.

And, taking the side of a
foreign country over your own citizens such as he did with Mexican
illegal aliens is High Treason.

On the BP Oil Spill:
Continuing Disaster. Unlike Obama, who blames his predecessor for
every woe, I do not hold him responsible for the actual spill.
But, the buck stops with him, it did occur on his watch, his federal
agencies had approved BPís disaster response plans and his Minerals
Management Service was far too engrossed in watching porn to be
concerned about BPís safety shortcomings. Obama campaigned for two
years to earn that responsibility, so I do fault his excruciatingly
slow, inexplicably aloof response and his failure to fully engage every
last resource, including the US Navy. I also fault his politics.
After being less than attentive for two months, he now gave BP an
unattainable weekend deadline to stop the oil, just ahead of a big
Tuesday address, where undoubtedly, with fistfuls of your tax dollars
and legislation in-hand it will be BO to the rescue. Obamaís
Waterloo may not be forthcoming just yet, but his Katrina will be here
for a very long time.

The true measure of a US presidentís
success is not how how many of his pie-in-the-sky promises have been
kept, nor how he is perceived by 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning
Politifact.com. It isnít how many of his socialist legislative
priorities have been enacted, but how those policies affect the lives of
the people who entrusted him to represent them. It is how he has
upheld his oath of office, respected the US Constitution, promoted US
exceptionalism, energized our free markets, represented the majority,
defended our freedoms and ensured our security. And, on that
score, Barack Obama has failed miserably. Itís his ass that needs
to be kicked, right out of the White House.

Obama Skips Arlington To Visit Louis
Farrakhan

Atlas Shrugs asks, how is Obama spending his
Memorial day weekend? Honoring the glorious dead? Not a
chance.

He pow-wowed with race baiter, Jew-hater Louis
Farrakhan, a frequent visitor to the White House. Back in March,
Farrakhan blamed the Jews for Obama's woes.

Jackie Calmes, a New
York Times reporter who covers the White House, was in Chicago covering
Obama's visit there this weekend. On Saturday night, she was one
of the reporters who was assigned to the White House pool of reporters
covering Obama on his evening out having dinner at what appears to be,
according to the Chicago reporters on site, the home of Louis Farrakhan.
The official line is that it was the home of Marty Nesbitt, treasurer of
Organizing for America, but the house is "is tax exempt for being a
religious institution." The press pool van was parked nearby.
Here is what Jackie Calmes reported on behalf of the press pool:

At 7:20 local time the pool was holding at
Woodlawn and 49th, next to a large sandstone mansion that the
Chicago reporters say is the home of one Louis Farrakhan. Our
Secret Service agent allowed us off the bus (Air!) and as a dozen of
us congregated on the sidewalk, inevitably some shoes touched grass.
Immediately a polite man in jeans and Tshirt emerged to ask us to
stay off the grass. Though this grass was the curbside city
property, we obliged.

Soon, however, he was pacing and
talking on a cell phone. He went inside the mansion's black
wrought iron fence, crossed the well-landscaped yard, lifted a water
bucket behind rose bushes and, voila!, a walkie-talkie. He was
heard to refer to "the CIA" once he began speaking into it.

Soon he approached our agent, asking him to move the van and its
occupants, though your pooler could not hear much else he said.
But the agent said, "How is this a security breach?" And he
asked if the house was a government property. The man said
something else and at that point the agent stuck out his hand to
shake hands and introduced himself as a Secret Service agent.
He added, "Sir, I can assure you that we will do nothing to
interfere with whatever is going on in there."

The man is
back to pacing and talking on his cell, walkie-talkie in hand.

A co-pooler searched the Internet for the address and found it
listed on a Web site called NotForTourists and another called
Taxexemptworld.com.

Indeed, another pooler found a county Web
site that confirmed this property is tax exempt for being a
religious institution.

Reinforcements arrived -- three men in
T-shirts reading "Wide or Die!" One surly man has been staring
daggers at us. Asked if this is Minister Farrakhan's house, he
just stared at your pooler. Asked again, he said, "I don't
have no comment."

At nearly 8 pm local time we are still
holding while POTUS and family remain at the Nesbitts.

It's
8:45 and nearly dark; your pool has retreated back inside the van.
We're outnumbered now by roughly a dozen Fruit of Islam agents for
the Nation of Islam. As each casually dressed man arrives, he
exchanges elaborate handshake/hug/double air-kisses with others.
Two walked by your pooler chanting "Islam."

Lisa de Moraes is
reporting that Barack Obama has agreed to sit down with the ladies
of "The View" this Thursday -- the first time a sitting president has
appeared on a daytime talk show, ABC says.

"View" den mother
Barbara Walters, who has been out since May after undergoing open heart
surgery, will "make an exclusive in-studio appearance" to interview
Obama, even though she wasn't supposed to return to work until
September. You didn't think she was going to let Whoopi Goldberg
or Joy Behar, who moonlights as a CNN Headline News show host, take the
lead on this interview, did you?

ABC says Obama's making the
appearance in order to talk about "his administration's accomplishments,
jobs, the economy, the Gulf oil spill and family life inside the White
House."

The last time he appeared on "The View," in March 2008,
he was running for president. First Lady Michelle Obama appeared on the
"The View" in June 2008.

So Obama will lie, and Walters
won't challenge him. It will be a hug-fest.

Threats Against Obama Prompt Secret Task
Force

Ronald Kessler is reporting that threats
against Obama have become so disturbing that a secret Presidential
Threat Task Force has been created within the FBI to gather, track, and
evaluate assassination threats that might be related to domestic or
international terrorism.

The task force operates within the FBIís
National Security Branch. It consists of 20 representatives from
pertinent agencies, including agents from the FBI and Secret Service and
operatives from the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Department, as well as
analysts.

Kessler reports that threats against Obama rose by as
much as 400 percent compared with when President Bush was in office.
Although threats fluctuate, the level continues to be at high enough
levels to call for the threat task force. Many of the threats are
from racists who have no connection with politics.

At the same
time, the Secret Service, which let party crashers into the White House
in November, has been spinelessly acceding to requests of the Obama
administration officials for Secret Service protection in instances
where there are no threats against them.

As a result, 40 Obama
administration officials and White House aides are under Secret Service
protection, compared with 32 under George W. Bush. No one outside
of the government has heard of most of these officials, but they have
one thing in common: They enjoy being chauffeured free of charge by the
Secret Service.

Ben Shapiro
says that
sometimes, you get the feeling that Obama simply isnít very comfortable
in the job. Sure, he loves speaking before adoring crowds.
And we all know that he adores his trusty troop of teleprompters.
But as soon as he moves off script -- when we get Obama being Obama --
he seems ill at ease.

Unless heís in his element, that is.
Heís in his element while playing golf. Heís in his element while
playing basketball. And apparently, heís in his element while
appearing on "The View."

In the past, Iíve compared Obama to a
teenage girl. "The president is like an unattractive high school
girl desperately looking for a date to the prom," I wrote in June 2009.
"Any boor can take her home for a few compliments."

He may not be
a teenage girl, but he certainly likes chatting like one. It is
utterly unpresidential for a sitting president to spend his days
chatting up Joy Behar just because, as Obama put it, "Look, I was trying
to find a show that Michelle actually watched, and so I thought this is
it, right here." Note to Obama: if you want to talk to Michelle,
walk down the hall. You donít have to subject the rest of the
country to the spectacle of Joy Behar drooling on your sleeve.

Obamaís brilliant repartee with the girls on "The View" included talk
about Snooki from Jersey Shore -- "Iíve got to admit, I donít know who
Snooki is"; his vacation -- "it couldnít have been a better couple of
days"; and blacks -- "weíre a mongrel sort of people."

But most
of all, it contained copious doses of Obamaís patented False Humilityô
and Unintentional Ironyô. "[W]e shouldn't be campaigning all the
time," Obama said. "There's a time to campaign, and there's a time
to govern." He said this on "The View," a daytime television show.
Over the weekend, heíll be doing two DNC fundraisers. Now thatís
what I call governing.

That wasnít all. After spending the
better part of two years blaming President Bush for everything under the
sun, Obama told the sycophantic audience, "You said itís been tough for
me, but the truth is itís not tough for me. I donít spend a lot of
time worrying about me." Excuse me while a laugh hysterically Ö
still laughing Ö okay, done. Have you ever noticed that the people
who speak most about their selflessness are often the most selfish
people you meet? This guy does nothing but worry about himself,
which is why he tosses people under the bus on a regular basis -- and
why he constantly tells us how grand he is.

People like Shirley
Sherrod, whom he appointed knowing full well what she was. When
confronted about his firing of Sherrod, he immediately blamed everyone
in the entire world, except for himself. "What I do think happened
in that situation is that a 24/7 media cycle thatís always looking for
controversy and often times doesnít get to the facts first, generated a
phony controversy," he said. "A lot of people overreacted,
including people in my administration." Not him, mind you.
People in his administration.

Actually, he said, it was God who
was to blame -- or Darwin -- since God/Darwin created a "reptilian side
of our brain" that leads to mistrust "if somebody sounds different or
looks different." By God, weíre all third graders and heís going
to lecture us on basic classroom morality. Then heíll sing Barney
songs.

But this is the crowd that eats this sort of thing up.
That weeps when Oprah trots out her latest sob story. That cheers
wildly when Tyra hands them bottles of Vaseline. No wonder this is
Obamaís target audience. Many people who watch "The View" are,
quite simply, idiots.

And Obama preys on idiots like a vulture on
the carcass of a bloated beached whale. Thatís why he can tell
them with a straight face that he has saved 2.5 million jobs and they
hoot and holler as though he has. He can play the innocent victim
of brutal bullies and they sigh as though theyíre watching a re-run of
My Bodyguard.

Hereís the problem for Obama: even though he
thinks weíre a nation of morons, weíre not. Weíre onto his act.
And there arenít enough people in the studio audience of "The View" to
make up the electoral gap.

Obama's Calendar For August 3, 2010

The Associated press
reports that
after a series of morning briefings, Barack Obama will sign the Fair
Sentencing Act in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

The legislation
narrows the disparity between sentences for crack cocaine possession and
those for powder cocaine. This has been one of Obama's biggest
issues for years.

In the afternoon, Obama will host a town hall
meeting in the East Room. It's part of his Forum With Young
African Leaders.

The event brings 115 young leaders from more
than 40 African countries to Washington to meet with their American
counterparts and U.S. government officials.

Obama will discuss
with them their vision for Africa for the next 50 years. He also
will talk with them about partnerships that can be fostered between the
U.S. and their countries.

There goes another 10 or 20 billion.

A Dim Bulb In The Oval Office?

Herbert E. Meyer
recalls that during his eight years in the White House, President
George W. Bush was often described by liberals as being about halfway
between an idiot and an imbecile. They told us he was so
inarticulate -- so unable to express himself clearly -- that his very
presence in the Oval Office was an embarrassment for the United States.
Members of the White House press corps, spoofing a popular movie, called
him the English Patient.

Yet no one, anywhere in the world, ever
had trouble understanding what President Bush was saying.

Obama,
on the other hand, is invariably described by these same people as
brilliant -- indeed, the most articulate carbon-based life form ever to
have walked the Earth.

So how come every time Obama opens his
mouth to state his position on some issue -- as he did this weekend,
speaking about his support for that mosque near Ground Zero -- the White
House scrambles to issue a "clarification" -- followed less than a day
later by an "elaboration" of the clarification?

Come to think of
it, President Bush speaks twice as many languages as Obama (to be
precise, two). Oh, and in eight years President Bush never said
anything even remotely as stupid as Obama's comment that people in
Austria speak Austrian.

Perhaps we should put less effort into
forcing the release of Obama's original long-form birth certificate, and
more effort into forcing release of his IQ. Anyone want to take my
bet that it'll be lower than George W. Bush's?

Obama Takes A Break

CNSNews.com is
reporting that there has been no mainstream media criticism of Obama
for taking another vacation --
his sixth.

The Associated Press
(AP), which has become Obama's number one apologist and propagandist
headlines:

"Oil spill and Iraq combat over, Obama takes
break"

AP tool, Glen Johnson, writes, "Finally, President
Barack Obama can relax on vacation. The Gulf oil leak is plugged.
The last combat troops are out of Iraq. And Congress is on its own
summer break."

Martha's Vineyard has previously played host not
only to Obama, but also two other presidents, Bill Clinton and Ulysses
S. Grant. It has been a traditional gathering point for affluent
African-Americans, and Obama visited even before he was elected the
country's first black president in 2008.

"It's a beautiful part
of the country. It has really nice beaches and the folks are
really great. The food is terrific," deputy press secretary Bill
Burton told reporters aboard Air Force One. "And it's someplace
that the president went before he was president and likes to go back,
because it's a comfortable place where he can rest and recharge the
batteries a little bit."

The spokesman said he expected Obama to
indulge in golfing, beach time and a visit or two to the island's
numerous ice cream stands.

Obama was "hands off" on the Gulf
Spill, and was opposed to Iraq and The Surge, but APer Johnson provides
these events as rationale for another Obama absence from the job.

Poor guy, he's all worn out
from reading the teleprompter -- do you ever wonder who's really running
the gummint?

The Lost Promise Of Barack Obama

Michael Gerson
says the most destructive gap for Obama is not the Republican lead
on the generic congressional ballot, or even a job disapproval that has
surpassed approval -- it is the gap between aspiration and reality.

The Manhattan mosque controversy showed the problem in compressed
form. First came the Obama of high-toned principle. Then a
politically motivated recalibration. Then a scrambling staff
explanation. Then an embarrassed silence, since it is difficult to
clarify the clarification of a clarification. Then Obama's
regretful assertion of "no regrets."

It was more than a lapse.
From the firing of Shirley Sherrod, to the obsession with Fox News, to
lashing the "professional left," the Obama administration engages in a
daily hypocrisy. It attacks the sound and fury of the cable news
cycle while being entirely captive to its rhythms. In the process,
it often appears reactive, windblown and unprincipled.

This gap
between ideals and practice is becoming a defining narrative of the
administration. Obama once promised, for example, to end the
"divisive food fight in Washington." Apparently there is an
exception for sugary, frozen beverages. In his new stump speech,
he says: "We're slipping and sliding and sweating, and the other side,
the Republicans, they're standing there with their Slurpees watching
us." In Seattle, the Obama pantomimed drinking a Slurpee to mock
his opponents. A campaigner such as Ronald Reagan could draw
political blood with a wink and a smile. Obama's partisan rhetoric
manages to be prickly, mean-spirited and unfunny. On the campaign
trail, he taunts and whines. He does not charm.

But this
much can be said: The rhetoric fits the message. Having spent
beyond the dreams of Franklin Roosevelt to produce a 9.5 percent
unemployment rate, Obama has reached an ideological dead end. His
natural policy inclination would be even more stimulus spending, now a
political impossibility. So he is left with attacking Republicans.
This is a natural political instinct, but it leaves Obama looking like
any other beleaguered, partisan politician.

The tensions
accumulate. The candidate who pledged to reach across party lines
passed his agenda in a steady march of party-line votes and strong-arm
legislative maneuvers. The candidate who sought to transcend
partisan divisions is viewed in a recent Democracy Corps poll as "too
liberal" by 57 percent of likely voters. The candidate who said he
would "fundamentally change the way Washington works" has seen public
distrust of government grow to pre-French Revolutionary levels.

The failure to change, or even to challenge, the culture of Washington
rankles on right and left. Here is Lawrence Lessig writing in The
Nation: "Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with
Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed."

The height of Obama's political fall is measured by how awkward the
echoes of his past rhetoric now seem. When he said recently,
"Let's reach for hope," it was indeed a stretch. It sounded like
an aging pop singer, grown paunchy and out of tune, stumbling through an
old favorite. Obama is pursued by the memories of his own promise.

Politicians have been known to say one thing and do another.
And high ideals and high rhetoric always create the potential for
hypocrisy, but the disappointment with Obama is especially acute.
He won office by providing new voters with intoxicating hopes.
America was tipsy with idealism -- resulting in a particularly difficult
hangover. Few presidencies have been built so consciously or
completely on an idealistic brand, with its own distinctive language and
icons. But this "new kind of
politics" has proved conventional in its conduct, predictable in its
content and exceptional only for the depth of division it has inspired.
The Obama administration is presented, not just with the prospect of
electoral repudiation, but with a question: How will it adjust to the
death of the belief that gave it birth?

For some, this is merely
a confirmation of their pre-existing view of politics -- that idealism
is a fraud, that rhetorical inspiration is a con. It is true that
many politicians do not improve upon closer acquaintance -- that no man
is a hero to his valet, but a nation of valets would lose its capacity
for great purposes. So it should be a source of sadness that
Obama, for many, has become a source of cynicism.

All politicians
fall -- but not from such a height.

On "The Vineyard," Bush Tees Outsell Obama
Tees

Brent Baker
picked up on a nugget surprisingly included in a Wednesday Boston
Globe article -- on Thursday night FNCís Bret Baier reported in his
"Grapevine" segment: "President Bush is apparently more popular than
Obama on Martha's Vineyard -- at least when it comes to clothing."
Baier relayed the day the First Family arrived on the Massachusetts
island:

When the First Family vacationed there last
year, Obama-themed trinkets were flying off the shelves. Now,
the owner of a store called the Locker Room says this summer's
best-selling shirt features Mr. Bush. And even Democrats are buying
it. It reads: "Miss Me Yet? How's that Hopey-Changey
Thing Working Out for Ya?"

In an August 18 Globe story, "Vineyard buzzes less
for Obamasí second visit," Milton J. Valencia reported on the Oak Bluffs
store:

...One barometer of the plunge in excitement
has been the sale of Obama-themed T-shirts, which designers had been
banking on after the craze of last year. Clothing labeled with
Obamaís name sold by the thousands, helping to salvage a tough
economic year for the island.

But this yearís T-shirt sales are much less brisk,
merchants say.

"Last year, Obama gave you goose bumps, but I
donít think youíre going to see that this year," said Alex McCluskey,
co-owner of the Locker Room, who sold more than 4,000 "I vacationed with
Obama" T-shirts last year. But so far this year, he said, his hot
item is T-shirts of former President Bush asking, "Miss me yet?"

Related:Obama doesnít travel light --
even on vacation -- he'll shut down the tiny island for a photo op.

Glen Johnson, reporting from Vineyard Haven,
says Barack Obama had a simple task for his first morning on vacation --
shoot over to a Martha's Vineyard book store to fill out his daughters'
summer reading list and grab himself a novel -- easier said than done.

His sports utility vehicle, part of a 20-vehicle motorcade, passed
through a cordon of Massachusetts State Police motorcycle officers, in a
protective cocoon of Secret Service agents. Tagging along for the
quick trip on Friday were White House communications trucks, an
ambulance and two vans full of reporters and photographers.

It
was the same drill on Saturday when he went to the beach for a picnic
lunch with his family.

This may be down time for Obama, but like
all modern presidents, celebrities and some wannabes, he must move about
with a not insignificant entourage, that includes security officers and
their array of arms, as well as advisers, friends in and out of
politics, and a cook who doubles as a golfing buddy.

Obama aides
said before the Massachusetts trip that Obama would travel light, with a
skeleton staff. When they landed on Cape Cod, Obama transferred to
Marine One, the presidential helicopter, while his staff and reporters
raced to a pair of Marine Corps CH-53 helicopters. Other Blackhawk
helicopters, painted identical to Marine One, flew with Obama's as decoy
aircraft. A State Police chopper swept over the route to Martha's
Vineyard Airport before the president passed overhead.

John Lillpop says in a jolting reminder of just
how far the American brand has fallen, the Islamic state of Iran began
start-up of its first nuclear reactor, a gift from the rejuvenated "evil
empire," AKA Russia. Yahoo.news.com reports:

"BUSHEHR, Iran Ė Trucks trucks rumbled
into Iranís first reactor Saturday to begin loading tons of uranium
fuel in a long-delayed startup touted by officials as both a symbol
of the countryís peaceful intentions to produce nuclear energy as
well as a triumph over Western pressure to rein in its nuclear
ambitions."

While the world is pushed to the brink of nuclear
confrontation between Iran and Israel, Americaís Marxist Muslim and
part-time U.S. president is off to Marthaís Vineyard for his sixth --
sixth! -- vacation of the year.

Critics are pouncing all over
Obama for his "fun in the sun" excesses, particularly now that Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has nuclear power.

By the way, the
notion that Iran is going nuclear only for "peaceful purposes" is so
absurd that only a goofy, misguided, and naÔve Muslim community
organizer with a Marxist mind set would believe it -- which brings us
back to the worldís greatest obstacle to peace, that being Barack
Hussein Obama.

Welcome to Martha Vineyards, sir? To show
their appreciation for Obamaís visit, the locals released the following
good news:

"Portions of Tisbury Great Pond, the
salt-water lagoon fronting the first familyís vacation estate Blue
Heron Farm, were closed earlier this week due to high levels of
enterococci, an indicator that the water is contaminated with fecal
coliform bacteria."

Fecal coliform bacteria?

Good heavens,
Obama would be better off in a gulf state, on an oil-blasted beach, than
the icky stuff at Marthaís Vineyard!

Still, given his disastrous
approval ratings and the poor prospects for Democrats in the upcoming
election, perhaps fecal coliform bacteria is what Obama deserves?

The Cipher In Chief

Rich Lowry
says there was a time when Barack Obama disavowed his middle name,
Hussein. During the 2008 campaign, Obama's aides bristled even at
references to him by his initials BHO, so sensitive were they to the
offending "H."

Then, after he won the election, he proudly
brandished his middle name as evidence of his connection to the Muslim
world and of America's tolerant embrace of people with even the most
exotic backgrounds. With new polls showing 18 percent (in a Pew
Research poll) or 24 percent (in a Time magazine survey) believing Obama
is a Muslim, the name Hussein is surely headed back to a secure,
undisclosed location.

That a sliver of Americans believes Obama
is a Muslim is not shocking in the context of other things they tell
pollsters. In a rebuke to geography teachers everywhere, 10
percent of people either don't think Hawaii is part of the United States
or aren't sure. Twenty percent believe aliens have contacted us
here on Earth. And 11 percent have confidence in the United States
Congress.

But the numbers tell us something important about
Obama: We don't know him. The most powerful and famous man in the
country is still the mysterious stranger. He rose from nowhere,
winning an election based partly on being an unknown quantity, and an
unknown quantity he remains.

Obama has proven adept at crafting
and then casting off synthetic identities. He was the
good-government process-obsessed reformer -- until he wanted to raise
countless millions of dollars outside the campaign-finance system.
He was the postpartisan scourge of politics as usual -- until his
hyperpartisan first 18 months in office. He was the moderate --
until he pushed his vast left-wing spending agenda.

Obama's
candidacy always had the sense about it of a supremely artful marketing
campaign. His bio video during the Denver convention made him
sound like a corn-fed product of the American heartland. There was
barely a hint of the father from Kenya and the boyhood in Indonesia and
Hawaii -- in short, what made him so biographically alluring to
worshipful journalists.

He was the blank canvas upon which
people could paint their visions of grandeur. One moment Obama was
the loyal parishioner of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who converted him to
Christianity and was the fount of preacherly wisdom from whom Obama
ripped off his most famous rhetorical riff, "the audacity of hope."
The next, he'd hardly heard of the good reverend.

An
element of the Obama-is-a-Muslim opinion is perfervid critics wanting to
believe the worst of him, but not all. According to Pew, the
number of Americans who identify him as Christian has declined from 51
percent in October 2008 to just 34 percent. The more we see of
him, the less we know of him. Only 46 percent of Democrats and 43
percent of blacks think Obama is a Christian. His faith simply
hasn't made an impression on the public.

Compared with his
predecessors, Obama is as transparent as a billiard ball. You knew
George W. Bush was an unapologetically pro-business, freedom-spreadin'
Texas evangelical. You knew Bill Clinton was a flawed but
brilliant Southern operator, part of whose charm was the ability to lie
with impressive fluidity. Who is Obama?

He's a man
constantly traveling under a cloak of ideological falsity, since he
can't speak frankly of his big-government ambitions. He's
emotionally remote. And he's the product of life experiences alien
even to his most natural supporters. In the heat of the
controversy over her firing from the Agriculture Department,
civil-rights activist Shirley Sherrod pointedly noted that Obama "is not
someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life."

None of this would matter particularly if Obama's program were
working -- he could identify himself with its successes. As it is,
he's the cipher in chief, overexposed but underperforming, as detached
as a law-school lecturer. Obama may not be a Muslim, but for many
of his countrymen, he remains a question mark.

Barack Obama: The Bully

David Limbaugh writes in his new book, "Crimes
Against Liberty," that he believes Obama is the quintessential partisan,
for sure, but he doesnít reserve his vitriol for Republican politicians. Heíll turn on anyone who stands in his way, and heíll make it personal
through bullying, ridicule, and demonizing. Obama believes he can use
his bully pulpit to say whatever he wants about anyone or any group,
whether foreign leaders, bankers, or tea party protestors.

Consistent with his narcissistic proclivities, Obama is angrily
intolerant of his critics. He dismissed President Bushís rare criticism
by snapping, "We won." Likewise, he lashed out at Senator John McCain
for objecting to his stance on Iran, declaring, "Only Iím the president
of the United States . . . and Iíll carry out my responsibilities the
way I think is appropriate" -- completely ignoring the substance of
McCainís criticism.

This is a hallmark of Obamaís governing
style: he takes things personally and keeps score. He exudes a sense of
entitlement about his agenda, expecting legislators to vote as he
commands, as opposed to, say, their consciences or the wishes of their
constituents.

For Obama, itís more than just a matter of
political power. Thereís also his egotistical sense that he is
absolutely right about everything, that everyone else is wrong, and that
if given enough time, he can persuade the rest of the rubes of the
superiority of his positions. Weíve seen how he attributed the publicís
repudiation of his agenda via the Massachusetts Senate election to his
failure to sufficiently explain his healthcare position -- though he had
talked ad nauseam on the issue. But it was true of other issues as well
-- even strong moral issues for which there would never be a consensus,
as with his attempt to confront pro-life forces at Notre Dame.

He
took the same tack with the issue of homosexuality. At a White House
celebration of Gay Pride Month -- a controversial act in itself -- Obama
said he aspired to persuade all Americans to accept homosexuality -- as
if the issue were simply about "accepting homosexuals," and that anyone
opposing special legal classifications for homosexuality was prejudiced,
discriminatory, and as Obama claimed, possessed of "worn arguments and
old attitudes." He added, "There are good and decent people in this
country who donít yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters --
not yet."

As a candidate, Obama usually told voters what he
thought they wanted to hear. He told an audience in Las Vegas he wanted
to help "not just the folks who own casinos but the folks who are
serving in casinos." But after usurping the Oval Office he wasnít quite as
solicitous. In one of his many anti-capitalist riffs he took a cheap
shot at CEOs at a townhall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, in February
2009. "You canít take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on
the taxpayersí dime." Obamaís careless statement elicited a strong
reaction from Las Vegas businessmen, many pointing out that if their
business suffers, the first and hardest hit are the front line workers
-- the people at the front desk, the bell staff, and the taxi drivers,
precisely the people Obama courted during the campaign.

The Las
Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported that more than 400
conventions and business meetings scheduled in the city had been
canceled, translating into 111,800 guests and more than 250,000 "room
nights," costing the cityís economy more than $100 million, apart from
lost gaming revenue.

And despite British Petroleumís assurances
that it was "absolutely" responsible for the disastrous oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico, Obama unleashed on BP a non-stop barrage of verbal
abuse. Using language not usually heard from a U.S. president, he told
NBCís Today Show that he consults experts about the spill to find out
"whose ass to kick."

Jim Hoft
says the far left Obama just hauled the State of Arizona in front of
the UN Human Rights Council. For the record, this sham council
includes human rights offenders Cuba, China and Libya. The Obama
administration told the United Nations Human Rights Council that
America's human rights record was less than perfect in a
report
this week.

Apparently Barack Obama is not content to make a
federal case out of his immigration feud with Arizona; he just made
it an international one.

Obama's first-ever report on U.S.
human rights to the UN Human Rights Council contains a rich vein of
offensive material. So far, one aspect has not been reported:
petty Barack used the situation to bash Arizona's immigration law --
and possibly transfer jurisdiction over the law from Arizona to the
UN. Throughout the report, which sounds like an Obama campaign
speech, he discusses "the original flaw" of the U.S. Constitution,
America's tolerance for slavery, and his version of our long and
despicable history of discriminating against and oppressing
minorities, women, homosexuals, and the handicapped. After
each complaint, he addresses how he is delivering us from ourselves,
patting himself on the back for such initiatives as ending
"torture," promoting Affirmative Action, and passing health care
legislation.

In his section on "Values and Immigration," he
praised the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to provide
better medical care for detainees and increase "Alternatives To
Detention" (e.g., letting them go). Then he turned to the one
state that has had the temerity to stand in his way of fundamentally
transforming the American electorate:

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has
generated significant attention and debate at home and around the
world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that
argues that the federal government has the authority to set and
enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the
law are currently enjoined.

On Obama's command, Attorney General Eric Holder
has sued the State of Arizona for passing a law that he criticized
without reading, and which merely upholds federal law. (He
gave sanctuary cities a pass.) He now threatens an additional
lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio for "racial profiling" when
arresting illegal immigrants near the Mexican border.

Don't expect any push back from Cuba or Libya on
this crazy report.

Obama Cares About The Constitution -- Ha!

Wayne Allen Root says this would be funny if it
wasn't so sad and hypocritical. When it comes to the mosque at
Ground Zero, Barack Obama is suddenly concerned with the Constitution?
Why now?

This mosque will never be built. When you have the
police, Mafia, Village People, and Harry Reid all aligned against it,
it's safe to say it's not going to happen. And I think it's also
safe to say Obama just waded into the biggest mistake of his political
career. He just cemented his fate as a one-termer by ignoring the
opinions of about 70 percent of 300 million common-sense, deeply
offended Americans.

The U.S. Constitution didn't bother Obama (a
former constitutional law instructor), yet
now when the issue involves Muslims building a mosque steps from Ground
Zero, where thousands of people died, Obama suddenly cares about the
Constitution?

Let's take a look a look at just a few of the cases
where Obama has ignored, or violated, the Constitution:

Obama
didn't care about the law or Constitution when he threw the bondholders,
shareholders and secured creditors of GM and Chrysler under the bus so
he could hand majority ownership to his union cronies that bankrupted
and destroyed them in the first place. But hey, what's a little
violation of the Constitution when you can pay off your biggest campaign
contributors?

Obama didn't care about the law or Constitution
when he passed universal health care that will eventually force American
citizens at gunpoint (with the help of 18,000 new IRS agents) to buy
health care, pay a fine or go to jail. But hey, what's a little
violation of the Constitution when you can pay off your big health care
and health insurance contributors?

And don't forget the biggest
beneficiaries of ObamaCare -- the trial lawyers. Obama made them
billions by refusing to allow tort reform in the health care bill.

Obama didn't care about the law or Constitution when he raised taxes
on everyone to pay for universal health care -- except union employees.
But hey, Lincoln saved the union. Obama has pledged to do
everything in his power to save the union, too -- the government
employee unions, even if it means violating the rights of every nonunion
employee and taxpayer in America.

Obama didn't care about the law
or Constitution when he asked the U.S. Justice Department to sue Arizona
for simply enforcing U.S. immigration law. Don't forget who joined
Obama's side in the lawsuit versus one of our own states -- Mexico.
Here's an idea. What Obama should have done instead is secure our
borders and sue Mexico for the billions of dollars America's taxpayers
are forced to pay annually for the welfare, education, medical care,
Medicare and Social Security of Mexican citizens here illegally.
Where is that lawsuit, Obama?

Root leaves
out the biggest issue of all -- Obama didn't care about the law or
Constitution when he usurped the Office of the President of the United
States.

Obama, Eighteen Months Later

Paul Crovo
says the downhill slide in Obama's poll numbers seems to continue
unabated. And with each passing week, Obama and the Democratic
Party seem unable to get out of their own way. How did we get to
this point in eighteen short months? It appears that a series of
unanticipated events have brought out the true Barack Obama, the one
that the wide swath of media supporters wanted us to overlook going into
the 2008 election. Whether it is the incident involving Professor
Gates and Sergeant Crowley or the issue of the mosque being built in the
shadow of the one-time World Trade Center, the non-cerebral, peristaltic
utterances that flow from Obama's mouth seem all too reflective of some
deeply rooted, core beliefs. Obama's response to the oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico represents yet another example of an inexperienced
Obama being caught unprepared, and unable to deal with an unscripted
event requiring an immediate response. The sound bites emanating
from the Oval Office during the earlier phases of this disaster sounded
like those coming from someone groping for answers, or at least looking
for someone to blame. Finding "someone's ass to kick," and demands
to "plug the damn hole," do not sound like composed statements that
would come from a true leader during a time of national crisis.
Seemingly lost without his teleprompter to tell him what to say, Barack
Obama stumbles and speaks in a glib fashion that diminishes the view
that this is an articulate man who can always talk his way out of a
difficult situation.

So, then, probing beneath the veneer of
stoicism and poise, there appears to be a man very uncomfortable and
insecure about who he really is. When people question his motives
or criticize his actions, his thin-skinned personality kicks in.
His lack of experience as a leader is on display for all to see and he
has no answer for this. His fallback reveals those core beliefs
that were instilled in him at a much younger age, those which his
pandering panoply of progressive press people were never interested in
sharing with the American people for fear of questions about who this
man really is. And now that Obama has had to act off-script, his
followers still defend him; the inertia is too great. The deeper
the hole Obama digs, the deeper the media go with him, to justify and
affirm their earlier decision to support their appointed visionary.
Yes, this was the one who would unite America, bring an end to the
racial divide, reach across the aisle to pass legislation and heal the
relationships with our enemies around the world.

Using one of his
favorite analogies to assess our country's situation that the
Republicans drove the car into the ditch, Barack Obama has taken the car
out of the ditch, but has proceeded to drive it the wrong way against
oncoming traffic along the highways of America, "flipping off" other
drivers who rant against his law-breaking style of transportation as he
passes them by. He cares not who he injures in following his
dangerous and illegal itinerary because it is all about him and his
agenda. Insidious debate on the airwaves about a more pragmatic
Obama that would run to the center before the November elections to help
save his Democrat supporters in Congress has been a joke. His
program was pre-calculated, and the speculated tempering of an unpopular
set of policies has been some fantasy. The American public be
damned. Forget the future generations of taxpayers who will be
encumbered with the massive debt he has piled on their backs, the
Americans of today who shudder to think of the weak-kneed foreign policy
that encourages Islamic terrorists to bring their treachery to our
shores for lack of reprisal and the citizens who bear the burden of the
entitlements and criminal activities of illegal immigrants. Thus
it is that so much of his legacy has already been written in less than
two years.

The people of America, by and large, have seen enough
of this. In a little more than two months a highly energized
conservative electorate will go to the polls and make their voices
heard. Between now and then, while the congressional Democrats
resort to their Saul Alinsky handbooks to tell their legions of MoveOn
mercenaries what to do, conservative grass roots organizations will look
to match them blow for blow. In the words of Barack Obama during a
June 13, 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to
the fight, we bring a gun." The conservative majority of America
brings its heart and its belief in the greatness of this country to the
fight and they will defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
There is a vigilance among the populace that bespeaks of a determination
to right the wrongs of the last eighteen months and return our country
to the path which our Founding Fathers had originally plotted more than
two hundred years ago. Their words and their deeds live in the
hearts of Americans today and carry them forward in the struggle to
reclaim what is theirs. A government of the people, by the people,
for the peopleÖ

The big
political event of the weekend was Glenn Beck getting at least 300,000
to hear him talk about faith and restoring America, and all that stuff.

And yes, the level of motivation on the right is bad news for the
Democrats, but it's not just that the right is uber-motivated. One
of Obama's key bases -- the NYT and its readers -- is throwing in the
towel.

Check out
this Krugman post where he wonders when Obama is finally going to do
something bold on the economy... and then check out the dispirited
comments.

I don't understand the inaction (both
legislatively and use of his bully pulpit) either.... I can only
HOPE, that the President knows something that everyone else doesn't.
Barring that, then he isn't the person I voted for.

Then go read
this unsigned official editorial from
the Times: Waiting For Mr. Obama. The first line:

If President Obama has a big economic
initiative up his sleeve, as he hinted recently, now would be a good
time to let the rest of us in on it.

Then go read
this from the Week In Review section
about Obama's rapidly dwindling policy options on the economy.

It
all seems pretty clear. Obama has lost the NYT and its readers.
That's not his total constituency, but it represents an important one in
terms support and money. His perceived failure to act with gusto
on the economy is what did it.

Obama's Shipwreck

Jonah Goldberg says you've got to wonder when
White House political guru David Axelrod will look at the churning pools
of poll data and, like Chief Brody in "Jaws," say: "We're gonna need a
bigger boat."

The analogy isn't quite right, because in the
movie, the shark ultimately loses. It's hard to imagine a scenario
where Barack Obama and Axelrod victoriously paddle away on the flotsam
of their own political wreckage. But in one sense, the analogy
works just fine: This White House is rudderless -- lost at sea, and
inadequate to the challenges it faces.

At the beginning of the
year, retiring seven-term Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.), recounted a
conversation he had with Obama. His unrelenting push for
health-care reform in the face of public opposition reminded Berry of
the Clinton-era missteps that led to the Republican rout of the
Democrats in 1994. "I began to preach last January that we had
already seen this movie, and we didn't want to see it again because we
know how it comes out," Berry told a newspaper.

Or, to quote
Brody in "Jaws 2": "But I'm telling you, and I'm telling everybody at
this table that that's a shark! And I know what a shark looks
like, because I've seen one up close. And you'd better do
something about this one, because I don't intend to go through that hell
again!"

Convinced that his popularity was eternal, Obama
responded by saying, yes, but there's a "big difference" between 1994
and 2010, and that big difference is, "you've got me."

The funny
thing is, Obama might have been right. Because things might be
much worse for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 1994 -- and the big
difference might well be Barack Obama.

Dragon
says, you know, if Obama was as smart as
he thinks he is, he would understand that the People question who he is
and what he is because of what he is hiding. No president in history has
ever sealed all of their files pertaining to their past.

Your
religion has been in the news before, and it continues today and with
good reason. Your grand-father was a Muslim, your father was a Muslim,
your step-father was Muslim, and you were registered a Muslim when you
went to school in Indonesia. You went on your trip through the Middle
East apologizing for America being a success. You have repeatedly tried
to re-write history by telling America that Muslims played a part in
Americaís past. As I have stated before, I donít remember any Muslims
traveling with Columbus, coming over on the Mayflower, or signing the
Constitution.

Now if this were the early 1940′s and your last
name was Shultz or Yamato, even more people would question you.

Now Iím sure that all Muslims are not terrorists, but when the World Trade
Center was destroyed, there was dancing in the streets throughout the
Muslim world (video). This is one reason why people donít like Muslims.

You might also understand that there in a difference between a long form
birth certificate and a COLB, and since the one you posted has been
proven to be a fake, itís understandable why people think you are a
fake.

None of this is George Bushís fault, but you would
understand this too if you spent more time doing your job and not going
on vacation all the time. Millions of Americans are out of work and you
just finished your 10th vacation in less than 2 years. And what the hell
is wrong with Camp David? You could go there and still play golf, shoot
hoops, and ride a bike.

But you are not as smart as you think you
are, and the People are tired of your lies and tired of you spending
money that we donít have.

Of the People, by the People, and for
the People, remember that Mr. Obama? Well maybe you should, because you,
Congress and the Senate work for us and this is our Country, this is
America and God willing the People will show you and your Marxist
Administration come November. So you might want to stay in town that
day, and stay off the golf course.

The new wheat,
cream and blue colored oval-shaped rug is made of 25 percent recycled
wool. The rug has the Presidential seal in the center and
historical quotes of meaning to Obama around the border. The rug
was made and donated by the Scott Group, an American carpet manufacturer
headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich. The Scott Group previously
made the Oval Office rug designed for former President Bill Clinton as
well as rugs for the White House State Dining Room.

Obama picked
a bunch of historical quotes that are woven around the edge of the rug.
They are:

"The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear
Itself" -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt

"The Arc of the
Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice" -- Martin
Luther King, Jr.

"Government of the People, By the People,
For the People" -- President Abraham Lincoln

"The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the
Welfare of All of Us" -- President Theodore Roosevelt

Shades of "It
Takes a Village" -- Obama just had to get that collectivist quote in
there.

What American President Would Do That?

Carol Taber says other presidents have been
wrong. Other presidents have been misguided. Other
presidents have been weak and pusillanimous and pathetic.

Only
one truly disdains America. His name is Barack Obama.

How
else to explain his latest outrage against the country that elevated him
to the ranks of world leadership? Last week, the Obama State
Department submitted a report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human
Rights on the supposed human rights violations taking place in the
United States. According to the Washington Times, the report
describes how the United States discriminates against the disabled,
homosexuals, women, Native Americans, blacks, Hispanics and those who
don't speak English. There is the expected pandering to
Muslims...the report notes that until recently, the U.S. engaged in
torture, unlawfully detained terrorist suspects and illegally spied on
Americans communicating with terrorists...but the report assures readers
that Obama has been putting a stop to all that.

Beyond the
outrage felt by Governor Jan Brewer, whose move to protect Arizonans'
human rights was offered up as an example of an abuse of human rights by
Obama's State Department report (gotta protect those drug cartel
murderers!), for many citizens, this report is a rank anti-American
manifesto and the last straw. Many believe it to be outright evil,
that there is no other word to encompass Obama's disgraceful and
indefensible decision. This odious report has placed America -- us
-- on a list of human rights violators that includes Iran, North Korea,
and Sudan. And Obama and his administration have done it
purposefully, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.

The
truth, on the other hand, is that every demographic group mentioned in
the report as victimized by America is better off in America than in any
other country on earth. That's why they stay here. If they
don't like America, they're free to leave at any time. We're not
the Soviet Union or China, restricting population flow. European
glories are only a plane ticket away.

But they don't leave.
That's because the people of America have a higher standard of living,
more opportunity for high-quality health care (at least for a little
while longer), a better shot at a decent education, and more personal
freedom to pursue occupations of their choice -- and life, liberty, and
happiness -- than in any other place on the planet.

But according
to Obama, splinter groups of Americans (including women, who compose a
majority of the population) are hapless and defenseless victims of our
"downright mean" country, a description coined by Michelle Obama during
Obama's campaign for president.

Michael Fraley
comments on Time Magazine's Michael Sherer's examination of "How
Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular." Could it possibly be due to a string
of broken promises and lies? Unprecedented spending?
Government overreach? The ramming through of unpopular
legislation? Nope -- it's all the people's fault.

... trust in the federal government was at a
historic low, dropping to around 25%, where it still remains.
Yet Obama has offered government as the primary solution to most of
the nation's woes, calling for big new investments in health care,
education, infrastructure and energy. Some voters bucked at
the incongruity, repeatedly telling pollsters that even programs
that have clearly helped the economy, like the $787 billion
stimulus, did no such thing.

Yes that's right: Obama has called for
"investments" and programs that have "clearly helped the economy."
But those people, ungrateful lot, just cannot get past their perceived
"incongruity." Come on people, don't you remember?! Hope and
change? The One we've been waiting for?

Not to worry, for the One
is not one to wait around for the people.

Rather than dwell on the political problems,
the President pushed his team forward, believing, in the words of
top adviser David Axelrod, that "ultimately the best politics was to
do that which he thought was right."

But his team...oh, how they have dragged him down.

"It is inconceivable that a team so
disciplined during the presidential campaign can't carry a message
with the bully pulpit of the White House," says one Democratic
strategist working on the midterm elections. "It's politically
irresponsible, and Americans have little patience for it."

So, in reality, the American people lack
patience...with Obama's team. Their challenge, according to
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, is to get the voters "to make
connections between what is happening in Washington and what is
happening in their lives." Hmm... actually it seems that voters
are making the connections just fine, thank you. But take heart!

For now, Obama's aides hope that the controversial reforms in
health care and financial rules will produce benefits felt by voters, if
not by November 2010, then two years later. That would vindicate
Obama's vision of government as a solution and not just a problem.

We people are slow, so it might take us a couple years to catch up
to the One. I mean, we're only human.

Major Newspaper Calls For Impeachment Of
Barack Obama

Anthony Martin
says The Washington Times, considered by some to be one of the top
10 most influential newspapers in the country, due to its considerable
standing with conservatives, has called for the impeachment of Barack
Obama.

The Washington Times, which has become known through the
years as D.C.'s major alternative newspaper, called for the ouster of
Obama in an op-ed column yesterday. The Times is delivered into
the mailboxes of every Senator and Congressman in Washington.

While one major site ranks the Washington Times in the top 100 daily
newspapers in the country (No. 92), for a publication to rank even in
the top 100 out of over 1400 daily papers in America qualifies the Times
as a "major daily."

Although the column does not officially
represent the editorial board of the newspaper, the fact that theTimes chose to publish it may indicate the official stance of its
publisher and ownership, given that the columnist is one of a select few
staff editorialists for the paper, and each column written by staff must
have prior approval of the brass.

"President Obama has engaged in numerous
high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in
Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more
must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached."

Thomas Lifson
says Obama flew to Milwaukee to
mark Labor Day at a union picnic ("Laborfest"), at a far smaller venue
than he used when marking the same event in 2008. Don't worry
about a rambunctious crowd, protest signs, or any other indignities,
though. Admission is by ticket only, with unions in charge of
distribution.

Even more curious is the absence of left wing
Senator Russ Feingold, facing re-election this year, and not showing a
lot of strength in the polls. Patrick McIlheran, columnist for the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has a witty column on the visit:

It's quite a party: Parade organizers were
still looking for volunteers to help carry the giant protest puppets
of the Earth Goddess and such. Pity, then, that Russ Feingold,
the incumbent Democratic senator in a neck-and-neck race, can't hang
out with the president. [....]

Many presidents fall in public esteem by mid-term,
but with Obama, the change is more fundamental. What put him in
office certainly wasn't experience, nor was it any explication of the
agenda that, now revealed, has frightened off one in four of his voters.
Rather, it was that he was the great center hope, a man to unite
factions and span fissures. That's gone, say polls. The
center no longer hopes in him, and so when he appears in a state where
his party's senatorial and gubernatorial candidates are in deep trouble,
he can appear only before a crowd heavy on AFSCME and SEIU.

Another way putting it is that Obama has been discovered to be a fraud.
Once trust is lost, it is never easily regained. This is the stark
reality of Democrat politics; their standard-bearer is toxic. The
only thing that can save the Democrats' fortunes is GOP incompetence and
untrustworthiness. So, regrettably, all is not gloom for the
Democrats.

Lil Bow Wow

Barack Obama says "they talk about me like a dog" (01:24)

Toby Harnden says just when it seemed that Barack
Obama couldnít dig himself any deeper into the political hole heís in,
he does something really stupid. "Some powerful interests who had been
dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and theyíre not
always happy with me," he told a union crowd in Milwaukee. "They talk
about me like a dog. Thatís not in my prepared remarks, but itís true."

The comment makes him look ridiculous. First off, there are
inevitable racial overtones to it. To be treated "like a dog" is to be
treated as something less than human. In the Muslim world, to call
someone a dog is a pretty serious insult (and no, Iím not suggesting
Obama is a Muslim).

Looks
like the self-pitying Obama is looking for sympathy and attention.

Again,
it is all about him, but whatís the deal with thinking people are
talking about him like a dog? For an elitist, he certainly has a whopper
of an inferiority complex.

Spaniel? Terrier? St. Bernard? No,
a mongrel -- "a
mutt like me" -- after all, Obama has no papers!

Democrats in Congress are no longer asking
themselves whether this is going to be a bad election year for them
and their party. They are asking whether it is going to be a
disaster. The GOP pushed deep into Democratic-held territory
over the summer, to the point where the party is well within range
of picking up the 39 seats it would need to take control of the
House. Overall, as many as 80 House seats could be at risk,
and fewer than a dozen of these are held by Republicans.

Political handicappers now say it is conceivable that the
Republicans could also win the 10 seats they need to take back the
Senate. Not since 1930 has the House changed hands without the
Senate following suit.

Is this a piece from National Review, The Weekly
Standard, The Wall Street Journal or Fox News.com, all major
conservative news outlets in the United States? No. Itís a
direct quote from yesterdayís Washington Post, usually viewed by
conservatives as a flagship of the liberal establishment inside the
Beltway. The fact The Post is reporting that not only could
Republicans sweep the House of Representatives this November, but may
even take the Senate as well, is a reflection of just how far the
mainstream, overwhelmingly left-of-centre US media has moved in the last
month towards acknowledging the scale of the crisis facing the White
House.

To its credit, The Washington Post has generally been
ahead of the curve compared to its main competitors such as The New York
Times in reporting Obamaís travails, but its striking front page
coverage of the "Democratsí plight" and talk of a possible GOP Senate
win (regarded as fantasy just a fortnight ago) was a bold step for a
publication that is probably read in every office of the Obama
administration.

The Post also ran another headline yesterday on
its front page -- "Republicans making gains ahead of midterm elections"
-- which would undoubtedly have sent a shudder through the White House.
It carried a new poll commissioned jointly with ABC News, which showed
public faith in Barack Obamaís leadership has fallen to an all-time low,
with just 46 percent approval. The Washington Post-ABC News survey
revealed high levels of public unease with Obamaís handling of the
economy, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving, and 58 percent
critical of his handling of the deficit.

For most of the year,
Americaís political and media elites, including the Obama team itself,
have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never
materialized), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party
movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping
America. It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is
to experiencing a political revolution in November that will
fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge
implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective
confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk
radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well --
historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version
promised by Barack Obama.

"Historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version
promised by Barack Obama."

Sounds good to me. Let's keep on
pressing Obama and his minions.

The Burning Hypocrisy Of Obama

Bluegrass Pundit
says the contrast between Obama's reaction to the planned burning of
Qurans by a Florida minister and the planned building of a Mosque two
blocks from Ground Zero by a New York Imam couldn't be more different.
Both people were clearly exercising their rights under the American
Constitution and law. However, both parties were taking actions
that were clearly offensive to certain groups. Quran burning is
offensive to Muslims worldwide, and the Ground Zero Mosque is offensive
to victims and families of 9-11. Obama fully supported the Ground
Zero Mosque. He said:

"I believe that Muslims have the same right
to practice their religion as everyone else in this country."

When it came to the free speech right to burn
Qurans, Obama had a different take on the issue. President Obama said,

""If he's listening, I just hope he
understands that what he's proposing to do is completely contrary to
our values..."

Both the Ground Zero Mosque and the planned Quran
burning are boneheaded ideas, but Obama failed to support the free
speech rights of the Florida minister, and failed to tell the NY Imam
the Mosque location was a bad idea. Is it any wonder one in five
Americans think Obama is a secret Muslim?

After a visit by the
FBI, the Florida minister has announced a cancellation of the Quran
burning, and said he is flying to New York to meet the Ground Zero
Mosque developer in the wake of a reported decision to move the Mosque
location. Sources close to Sharif Al-Gamal deny a deal has been
struck.

Obama's could attempt to defend his decision to try and
stop the Quran burning by saying he is protecting U.S. Military and
civilian's lives by his Quran burning position. However, this
brings to mind the failed policy of German appeasement before WW II.

Remember Obama saying,
"In the wake of 9/11...I will stand with them [Muslims] should the
political winds shift in an ugly direction."

Obama Unable To Fill Room

Karen Farkas
says with less than an hour before Obama's scheduled speech, 75
seats remained empty in the recreation center at Cuyahoga Community
College's Western Campus.

So organizers went around campus and
recruited more students to fill the seats.

Student Jennifer
Rahal, of Parma Heights, whose class was canceled today, was working on
her art work in the coffee shop in the basement of the building when the
call went out for more guests.

After dropping off their stuff at
a bag check, the newly invited guests cleared security and filed into
the gym.

SpeakNowAmerica.org
reminds us that for the second year Obama will miss the 9/11
Ceremony.

Socialist Barack Hussein Obama will again not go to
9/11 ceremonies at Ground Zero. Obama was too busy to attend last
year also. Obama can play golf, have parties, and campaign across
America. What Obama wonít do is be an American. What beliefs
does he have that he refuses to accept the Muslims destroyed buildings
and killed approximately 3,000 Americans?

Every American over 21
can tell you where they were when they heard of the horror that was
happening on 9/11. Many people younger than 21 can tell you where
they were also. This is a day most Americans will never forget and
will always reflect on the tragedy.

When running for president
the socialist Obama showed up at Ground Zero. That was for show
and to win votes. Michelle Obama dissed it in 2008.
Campaigning and building the Obama war chest were more important to her.
She went to Los Angeles instead.

Obama can jet to New York for
dinner on a Friday night, but is too busy to honor all the brave
Americans who lost their lives on 9/11. He is too busy to honor
all the men and women who worked tirelessly and put their own lives in
danger helping after 9/11. He is too busy to honor the families of
those who died.

For the first time in Americaís history we have
an occupant of the Oval Office who cares nothing about America.
Obama has no understanding of what 9/11 is to America. Worse Obama
doesnít care what 9/11 means to America. He has an agenda and
America be damned.

Obama, The Academic Zombie

John Kelly says for those who've struggled to
find out what makes Obama tick, the mystery is over. It's simple.
His beliefs and values fully embody the same philosophy, to which the
vast majority of American university faculty members are fully invested.
He promotes, with near perfect predictability, their left wing,
collectivist, counter-American viewpoint. There are thousands and
thousands of academics out there gripping a similar playbook.

Those observers who missed this point early on either went to college
long ago or dutifully studied a narrow curriculum and failed to
scrutinize the cultural inclinations and revolutionary intentions of
their Oz-like, academic surroundings. Only now are some waking up
to find, "We're not in America any more."

Obama is the child of
two PhD's and, other than having been a senior lecturer at the
University of Chicago Law School, has no appreciable practical work
experience. Given his upbringing's remote fatherly attention and
his rejection of his mother's native culture, it may be safe to say that
Obama is more truly a progeny of academia than he is of either of his
natural parents.

One writer currently claims Obama is channeling
his father's Kenyan anti-colonialism. More accurately it is the
groupthink of academia to which Obama is fully assimilated and loyally
patriotic, not America or Kenya. Academia is the foster parent of
the entire Woodstock generation, culturally orphaned from their WW II
fighting parents whose shoes they never could fill.

There is a
natural tendency for those of any given profession to encourage the
technique and culture of their profession. The militarist will
support a chain of command and promote defensive readiness. The
religious leader will prescribe faith and offer guidance. The
athlete will promote physical exercise and a daily routine.

Accordingly, the academic will replicate the domineering teacher-student
relationship and reject out of hand all notions not academically and,
these days politically, correct. Today's dominant academic culture
promotes large government, wealth redistribution, and a stylishly green
and globally socialist point of view. To them American borders and
culture are irrelevant.

Alan Caruba
says, "I have this theory about
Barack Obama I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money
was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on
somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking,
half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and
concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile
speaking skills could even put him in the White House.

In a very
real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you
know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father"
was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of
Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are
some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls
himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.

His
political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be
deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois
legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good
fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his
disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for
the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part
of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first
stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to
be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John
Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A
charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black
population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the
antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of
volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

And
then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one
of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then
John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown
female governor from the very distant state of Alaska. It was a ticket
that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and
they went down to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in
love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like
Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed
against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.

Now, one-year plus into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up
to the White House have left him unprepared to be president. Left to his
own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong
time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the
briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible
realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy
America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly
Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained
a foothold in Spain.

The great crowds that greeted him at home
or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the
slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really
bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly and perhaps even
inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to
destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the
end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist
ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college
professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is
a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer
who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn
Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort
Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no
one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an
isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was
part of an al Qaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close
down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released
were known to have returned to the battlefield against America. He
could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of
9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an
obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having
anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on
Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day
because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats
itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration, or he
naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his
handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this
pathetic individual's life.

When anyone else would quickly and
easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over two million
dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we
all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a
make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.

We laugh at
the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is
President of the United States of America?"

Barack Obama's Bubble Has Burst

Donna Joyce
says there is much to be learned from the study of history, not the
least of which is that bubbles are endemic to human existence.
Seemingly out of nowhere a mania will burst forth, grab hold of the
masses, run a brief course, then crash and burn a short time later.
Depending on where one gets on, it can be an exhilarating ride or a
brutal lesson on the perils of following the crowd.

Noteworthy
bubbles of history include the South Sea bubble, the Dutch tulip bubble
and, more recently, the dot-com and the real estate bubbles. All
had meteoric rises, compelling people to dive into them with wallets
open and eyes closed. All had equally spectacular crashes,
destroying fortunes and families alike.

Mankind seldom learns
from history. Rather, it rationalizes that "This time is
different" or "This is the real deal." But it is never different,
never real. With bubbles, emotion trumps reason. Greed is
generally the culprit, but other emotions are equally powerful, such as
hope.

Our newest bubble, recognizable now that it is bursting
before our eyes, is Barack Obama. A man whose name was largely
unknown several years ago soared to stupefying heights of popularity in
a very short time. Millions of people attached themselves to his
meteoric persona. Massive crowds roared their approval of his
speeches. Women -- and not a few men -- wept and swooned in his
presence. Some compared him to God. He is real, we believed.
He is true. He will solve our problems because he is the One.

We were told that Obama had extraordinary gifts -- soaring
inspirational rhetoric, laser-like insights, economic knowledge, the
ability to unite us, to bring adversaries together and to surmount
insurmountable odds. We hoped. We believed.

Those who
questioned this image and pointed factually to his lack of experience
were called racists and bigots, marginalized by those who preferred
faith to facts.

Believe, hope, and ye shall be saved. So we
did.

Fast forward to 2010. The Obama bubble has burst.
Political moderates have fled. His speeches are met with
indifference and disdain. His dependence on the teleprompter has
become a national joke. His policies have exacerbated our
problems, not solved them. His endorsements guarantee electoral
defeat. The "I" word -- incompetent -- is heard with increasing
frequency. Even some media personages are critical.

How did
this happen? Quite simply, the Obama bubble, like all bubbles, was
unsustainable. A bubble is not, by nature, a long-term affair.
It always consumes itself, sooner rather than later. So it is with
Obama. He promised so much, too much to possibly deliver.
The hype produced the pop. Did anyone really believe he could slow
the rise of the oceans and cool the planet?

Previous bubbles have
cost peoplesí life savings. The Obama bubble may yet do this, but
it has already cost us something else of immense importance: our hopes
of racial absolution, the belief that electing a multiracial man with
black blood would somehow atone for past racial sins and wash away the
ugly rancor. Instead, racial issues have become more sensitive.
No one is happy. No one wants to kiss and make up. No one
wants to move on. The hope is gone.

Can we learn from our
mistakes? Maybe. There will be other bubbles. Our
collective memory is short. Human emotions will lead us down this
road again and again. The Obama bubble will go down in history as
yet another illustration of George Santayanaís words: "Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Crimes Against Liberty

Ben Shapiro says every president has his bÍte
noire. For Reagan, it was Sam Donaldson. For Clinton, it was
Ann Coulter. For Obama, itís David Limbaugh.

No better book has been written compiling the evidence against a
president that Limbaughís Crimes Against Liberty. "This book is about a
young presidency," Limbaugh opens. "[Y]oung, but already the most
destructive in American history. Everything about Barack Obamaís
radical background signals his visceral contempt for America -- its
culture, its values, and its political and economic systems. His
unmistakable goal is to bring America down to size -- an America that
has been, in his view, too big for its britches, selfish, exploitative,
unfairly wealthy, arrogant, and dismissive."

Thatís a powerful thesis, and Limbaugh
spends the better part of 400 pages proving it in painstaking detail. The amazing thing is that he doesnít even scratch the surface, as he
told me on my radio show in Orlando. Every day, Obama does something new
to destroy the Constitution and undermine Americaís founding values.

Ulsterman
says that a longtime Washington D.C. insider, and former advisor to
the Obama election campaign and transition team, speaks out on an
administration in crisis, and a man increasingly withdrawn from the job
of president.

In just a few words, how would you describe him
these days?

"Like I said, itís been a while since I was
last at the White House, but I donít have a problem saying that the
president is losing it. I donít mean he is like losing his
mind. I mean to say that he is losing whatever spark he had
during the campaign. When you take away the crowds, Obama gets
noticeably smaller. He shrinks up inside of himself. He
just doesnít seem to have the confidence to do the job of President,
and itís getting worse and worse. Case in point -- just a few
days before I left, I saw first hand the President of the United
States yelling at a member of his staff. He was yelling like a
spoiled child. And then he pouted for several moments after.
I wish I was kidding, or exaggerating, but I am not. The
President of the United States threw a temper tantrum. The
jobs reports are always setting him off, and he is getting
increasingly conspiratorial over the unemployment numbers. I
never heard it myself, but was told that Obama thinks the banking
system is out to get him now. That they and the big industries
are making him pay for trying to regulate them more. That is
the frame of mind the President is in these days. And you know
what? Maybe he is right, who knows?"

What does he do day after day?

"Well, he takes his meetings just like any
other president would, though even then, he seems to lack a certain
focus and on a few occasions, actually leaves with the directive
that be given a summary of the meeting at a later date. I hear
he plays a lot of golf, and watches a lot of television -- ESPN
mainly. Iíll tell you this -- if you want to see President
Obama get excited about a conversation, turn it to sports.
That gets him interested. You start talking about Congress, or
some policy, and he just kinda turns off. Itís really very
strange. I mean, we were all led to believe that this guy was
some kind of intellectual giant, right? Ivy League and all
that. Well, that is not what I saw. Barack Obama doesnít
have a whole lot of intellectual curiosity. When he is off
script, he is what I call a real 'slow talker.' Lots of ummms,
and lots of time in between answers where you can almost see the
little wheel in his head turning very slowly. I am not going
to say the president is a dumb man, because he is not, but yeah,
there was a definite letdown when you actually hear him talking
without the script."

That sounds like you are calling Obama stupid to
me.

"No -- I am not going to call him stupid.
He just doesnít strike me as particularly smart. Bill Clinton
is a smart guy -- he would run intellectual circles around Barack
Obama. And Bill Clinton loved the politics of being president.
Obama seems to think he shouldnít have to be bothered, which has
created a considerable amount of conflict among his staff."

So how bad are things at the White House these
days?

"I donít know about right now, because I
have not been there in over a month. But I still hear things,
and I know what it was like when I left. Itís not good.
As bad as it might look to voters based on what they do know, itís
much worse. The infighting is off the charts."

The above is excerpted and out of sequence from the
original article,
here . . .

Christopher Ruddy
says that he turned on the "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,"
expecting one of the lead stories to be about Obama's chief political
adviser, David Axelrod, announcing that he's quitting, on the heels of
other resignations this week coming from top Obama aides -- well, not
just aides.

In just the past few days, we have learned that
Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, is quitting. So is
his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who may leave as early as next month
to run for mayor of Chicago. And now, the news today, Obama's
senior political adviser, David Axelrod, is going back to Chicago --
ostensibly to run Obama's 2012 re-election.

But for the first
half of the NBC show, not a word about these developments.

Instead, the "lead" news story was that Facebook billionaire Mark
Zuckerberg was donating $100 million to the Newark, N.J., schools.
The network suggested he did so as a PR move to deflect criticisms made
of him in a soon-to-be-released Hollywood docudrama.

An
interesting story indeed -- but nothing compared to the story about the
wholesale departure of Obama's most senior advisers!

Perhaps it's
the media shielding, once again, Obama and his party from negative news
on the eve of a historic election.

These resignations can't be
welcome. Why would the Obama White House want a wave of
resignations announcements so close to a critical congressional
election? From Obama's point of view, this has to be the worst
possible news. It not only looks bad, but adds to the confusion
that seems to have cast a pall over the whole executive branch.

For each of the individuals -- Summers, Axelrod, and Emanuel -- it makes
great sense. They apparently see a sinking ship and realize they
need to jump off into a safe place.

Their resignations, at this
time, are a slap in the face to Obama. But, on the upside for
them, these three can move onto other, more significant positions in the
private and public sector, while still leveraging their contacts in the
Obama administration.

This is an extremely important point.
It is very valuable to be a former presidential aide for a president
still serving in the White House. With his immense national
network, just think of all the money Emanuel will be able to raise for
his bid to run the Daley machine.

Smart guy that Emanuel.
Ditto for Summers and Axelrod.

Obama In Free Fall

Herman Cain
says that in less than two years, this administration has produced
an unprecedented turnover rate of top administration advisors, a failed
stimulus spending bill, failed economic policies that have left the
economy stalled, much higher than expected unemployment, a hugely
unpopular health care bill, a financial regulatory deform bill, a list
of expensive poorly executed populist programs that flopped,
out-of-control federal spending, uncertainty about success with the war
in Afghanistan, and increased tensions with Iran, North Korea and China.

Millions of voters have come to realize that Obama lacks leadership,
direction, decisiveness, economic urgency and, most of all, solutions.
This combination of deficiencies has produced a more than uninspired
citizenry, except for his most loyal and misled supporters.

And
just like the supporter who confronted Obama at a supposedly friendly
town hall meeting last week, people are exhausted from listening to all
of the failed attempts to spin failures into successes with speeches and
media sound-bites.

A disheartened Obama supporter called my radio
show last week and asked if I could name one thing that Obama had done
right, since it seemed to him that all I talk about are the things that
have not worked. I honestly tried to think of something
significantly positive, but I could not. There have been too many
disappointments and broken campaign promises.

Obama is in free
fall, which means this nation is in free fall.

But after further
reflection, there is something he has inspired. With the help of
an incompetently led Congress, Obama has successfully awakened a
citizenís movement that has stunned the political establishment in both
parties. The political establishment and the Obama media call it
those Tea Party People. They canít seem to understand why people
are upset. Maybe theyíre not listening.

The administration,
Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, other Democrats, the ObamaMedia and other
liberals have responded to the citizensí movement with nothing but
name-calling attacks on the Tea Party people. Those tactics have
not worked. In fact, they appear to have further energized the
citizenís movement. Demonization and intimidation of "We the
People" is not working.

Obama's free fall started with an
unmanageable management structure. Fifteen cabinet heads and
dozens of czars is not a logical way to structure a leadership team.

Two of Obamaís top economic advisors have left in less than two
years, and the third of four, Larry Summers, has announced that he is
leaving. Rahm Emanuel, Obamaís chief of staff, is expected to
leave soon [this
week] to run for Mayor of Chicago, while senior advisor
to the president David Axelrod has confirmed that he will be leaving
sometime in 2011 to work on Obamaís re-election campaign. That
might be the uphill political challenge of the century.

Many
congressional Democrats running for re-election are distancing
themselves from Obama, ObamaCareand the
Cap and Trade and Tax and Kill bill. And they donít even talk
about all of the spending, which has not been the solution to economic
growth. In fact, they want to spend more!

And now the
Democrats have decided to wait until after the November elections to
pass legislation on the expiring current tax rates. This is a
signal that Obama and the Democrats are going to raise taxes. We
just do not know whether it will be on all of us or some of us.

Instead of a parachute, Obama and Congress are determined to put this
economy and nation into a nose dive.

Last night on Hannity, long-time Democratic
pollster Doug Schoen referred to the Obama Administration as a "failed
administration," and its only 20 months in.

62% Of Women And 63% Of Men Give Obama
Negative Marks

Pete Winn
says that more
than 6 of every 10 college grads are disappointed with Obama, and there
is no gender gap when it comes to Obama, according to a Harris
Interactive Poll released Monday. Both sexes now give Obama the
same negative ratings on job performance.

According to Harris
Interactive, 62 percent of women and 63 percent of men say the give him
negative ratings. That parallels the overall negative rating of 62
percent disapproval of the job heís doing,

Harris asked 2,620
adults "How would you rate the overall job President Barack Obama is
doing?" in an online survey between September 14 and 20.

Though
47 percent of Easterners and 42 percent of Westerners gave him positive
marks, nearly seven in 10 Southerners (68 percent) and two-thirds of
Midwesterners (67 percent) gave Obama negative ratings after only 20
months in the Oval Office.. 63 percent of college grads and 65
percent of those with a high school diploma had negative views.

Republicans were the most likely to give him negative ratings (93
percent) followed by self-described conservatives (86 percent), while
liberals and Democrats were most likely to give him positive marks (69
percent and 67 percent, respectively).

Independents, however,
gave him more negative than positive marks, as seven in ten of them (69
percent) give Obama negative ratings on his job compared to 31 percent
positive.

Alan Caruba
asks
are we there yet? Living in Obamaís America is like some horrid,
seemingly endless road trip with no bathroom breaks.

He has heard
a variety of scenarios regarding the months and days that Barack Hussein
Obama remains in office. There are countdown clocks available on
the Internet for those who have to know how much more horror we must
endure.

He has long since stopped watching or listening to the
man for the same reason he doesnít pay all that much attention to Mamoud
Ahmadinejad. Both lie all the time. Both are ideologues who
are immune to reality. Both are destined to come to a bad end.
He favors seeing Obama live to a ripe old age like Jimmy Carter, getting
up every day knowing how despised he has become, and he leaves the job
of trying to deduce his day to day machinations to those whose job it is
to figure out what heís up to. To them, he recommends some magical
chicken bones and shiny pebbles that can be tossed on a piece of black
velvet in order to extract a hint of the future from the patterns they
make.

He's not bragging because he had Obamaís number before he
took the oath of office. Dr. Jerome R. Corsiís book, "Obamanation,"
was and is a masterful piece of research that spelled out what we could
expect from him. Since then, books about Obama have become a
cottage industry with the latest by Bob Woodward confirming that he
always wanted to get the hell out of Afghanistan even when he was saying
he didnít.

All this has spawned another industry of sorts;
predictions about how the remaining time until January 20, 2013 will
play out for him. These scenarios mostly reflect the wishful
thinking of those putting them forth, but they are interesting if for
that alone.

There is the assassination theory. This was
advanced early on in the belief that some likely KKK member would kill
him for sleeping on the white sheets in the White House. There
hasnít been a presidential assassination since John F. Kennedy in 1963
so these events are rare. There was Lincoln, Garfield and
McKinley; four out of forty-four.

There is the impeachment
theory. Here again, history does not favor this option.
Impeachment has been rarely tried and never successful. The effort
to impeach Clinton only served to make him some kind of counterculture
hero. Having learned that lesson, a Congress controlled by the GOP
should simply do everything it can to thwart any further Obama
legislative initiatives, appointments, et cetera.

There is the
birth certificate theory in which the courts by some miracle actually
allow challenges to Obamaís eligibility to proceed to a point what he is
required to produce his long form birth certificate currently a vault in
Honolulu. Was he born there? At this point, it hardly seems
to matter. For all we know, heís still a bona fide citizen of
Indonesia. Or Kenya.

There is the resignation theory.
This is the thinnest of hopes because being President of the United
States is such a cool job that Obama would never give it up. Just
consider all the perks. Just consider all the ways he can screw
all of us colonialist, imperialist, capitalist Americans? He has
surrounded himself with people who can barely conceal their contempt for
the nation.

There is the election theory. This postulates
that he is a one-termer and, for the money, this is the only one that
holds up. His popularity, even among those who voted for him,
continues to tank. He has embarrassed the nation with all that
bowing to kings, emperors, and union leaders. Not unless the
Republican Party nominates a convicted child molester will their
candidate lose against Obama.

Not all the Tele-Prompters and
speeches between now and Election Day 2012 will help Obama get
re-elected. The only exception, possibly, would be World War Three
and even then Americans would vote for anyone else because, if there is
one thing we know about Obama, it is that he is a coward.

Like
Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama
will simply have to be endured while the Republican Party, re-energized
by the Tea Party movement, plays defense until a new quarterback can be
brought into the game.

Obama Is Destroying The Democrat Party

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann say comparisons
of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter miss the point. Carter's
presidency did little to change the basic party construct of the nation
or to influence its ideology. Reagan's presidency accomplished
both -- but Barack Obama is destroying the Democratic Party.

It
may not recover for a long time. In this, he most closely
resembles a synthesis of the failed candidacy of George McGovern and the
catastrophic presidency of Herbert Hoover.

The damage he is
doing to his party's image and prospects closely resembles the harm
Hoover did to the Republican Party, from which it did not recover for 20
years after he left office. And the extent to which Obama is
discrediting the left parallels the damage George McGovern did to his
ideological confreres in 1972, when he went down in flaming defeat.

In a sense, America met its first conservative in
1981, and fell in love. We met our first liberal in 2009, and are
running away screaming.

FDR was too long ago to count; Lyndon
Johnson too distracted by Vietnam to make an impact. So Obama is
the first full-throated liberal in the Oval Office in our lifetimes.
And we won't soon forget him and the lessons his failure is teaching us.

Strangely, the Democrats don't yet get it. They whistle a
happy tune as they march off the cliff. There is no voice of
dissent against Obama's policies, no mumbled animosity, no suppressed
discontent.

The party is solid as a phalanx behind its leader
even as he sends it to political death.

Michael Goodwin says he's tried homey backyard
settings, large campus rallies and teamed up with a crass hip-hop show.
Wherever he goes, he floors the rhetorical pedal, as when he likened his
slow-motion polices to the time it took to "free the slaves."
Barack Obama has gone from failing to flailing at ghosts. Even
allowing for desperate times, his desperate measures are a national
embarrassment.

Emancipation? Give us a break.

With
each passing day, his denunciations of dissent and inflated claims of
economic progress turn off the independent voters who will decide the
midterm elections. He is ignoring the sensible advice to listen to
the majority of voters and build a governing coalition. Instead,
he recklessly bets the remainder of his presidency on maintaining the
huge liberal Democratic majorities that helped him impose a string of
unpopular policies on America. If he fails, and there is good
reason to hope he will face a Republican Congress, he'll be the
loneliest man in Washington.

He is losing much of his White
House team, yet the obsequious hagiography continues. When Chief
of Staff Rahm Emanuel departed Friday, he claimed the last 20 months
were "the toughest time any president has ever faced." This is
farce masquerading as fact, but there is no sign Obama is willing to
bring in new aides who could help him chart a new course.

If
anything, he is doubling down on his self-aggrandizing Big Government
agenda, dashing hopes he would use the public revolt against him to
finally become the centrist many [brain-dead] Americans
believed they were electing.

A friend said the other day that
Obama's nonstop campaign speeches were useless because the country has
tuned him out. Politically speaking, that's true. The thrill
is gone, and his efforts to gin up enthusiasm seem a pale imitation of
2008. It's all vapors now as he hectors former supporters to "buck
up."

But it's impossible simply to ignore Obama. He is
the figurehead of a troubled nation, and he regularly reaches new depths of
demeaning the office as he fights public will.

His isolation
from reality produces cringes when he opens smaller gatherings to
questions. First, it was a woman in Washington who said she was
"exhausted defending you" and waiting for meaningful change. Then
it was a business owner in Iowa who complained tax hikes would make it
impossible to add jobs.

Both questioners were informed and
polite, one a supporter, one not. They represent the sturdy and
loyal backbone of the nation, but Obama was clueless about how to
respond.

Byron York
is reporting that former Vice President Walter Mondale said on CNN
that Obama relies too much on teleprompters -- which Mondale called
"idiot boards" -- when speaking to the American people.

In a
discussion of whether Obama projects empathy in his speeches, the 82
year-old Mondale said the president "has got to connect with the
American people." When CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked why Obama has
not shown more empathy, Mondale answered, "I've seen places where he's
done it. The Milwaukee speech, I thought was terrific. I
think some of these backyard events are terrific. But I think he
-- he's very bright -- as a matter of fact, brilliant. And I think
he tends to -- and he uses these idiot boards to read speeches on
television and I think he loses the connection that he needs emotionally
with American voters."

"You're talking about the teleprompters
that he always has when he's delivering a formal speech?" Blitzer asked.

"Yes, right," Mondale said.

"And he's reading it, basically
from the teleprompter," Blitzer said.

"Right."

"You don't
think that works, is that what you're saying?" Blitzer asked.

"Yes," Mondale answered. "You know if you're looking at the
teleprompter, you're here, you're here, you're here, and your audience
is right there. And I think he needs to do more of that."

Easy for you to say Fritz, but you
forget why Obama's handlers won't let him speak without them.
Watch this.

Oh, and
Fritzie-boy, where do you get that Obama is brilliant stuff. I've
never seen it. Slick or clever, maybe, but brilliant?

Obama Is A Jackass

ABC News
says derision of Obama on his program is nothing new, but Rush
Limbaughís tone today may have struck the ears of regular listeners as
particularly disdainful, taking his contempt of the Anointed One to a
new level.

The nationís preeminent conservative talk radio host
referred to Obama as a "jackass," an "economic illiterate" and an
"idiot, where capitalism is concerned."

The rough stuff came
during a monologue on Obamaís position on extending the Bush tax cuts to
all but the top two percent of wage earners.

Obama, Limbaugh
says, is an "economic ignoramus" for not understanding how a "tax
increase" on the wealthy won't stimulate growth.

Quoting an AP
article from yesterday, Limbaugh pointed out Obamaís remarks at a
meeting of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board that the wealthy would
"take our ball and go home" if their tax cuts arenít extended.
Limbaugh then addressed the following line to Obama directly:

"Mr. Obama, our imam-child, they have
already taken their trillion dollar ball home, and theyíre sitting
on it, you jackass."

(Limbaughís been calling Obama "Imam Obama" for
several months now.)

"Extend the tax cut to everybody, and you'll
inspire confidence," Limbaugh argued, saying that added degree of
certainty would free business to spend some of the capital theyíre
holding onto and hire people, "which, once upon a time, we were told,
was Obamaís top priority."

For not getting this, "He's a jackass.
He's an economic illiterate. He's an economic ignoramus."

"And that's being charitable," Limbaugh said.

Obama Considering Rule By Executive Order

Ben Johnson says political commentators are paying a
great deal of attention to one of the Los Angeles Timesí stories
about Barack Obamaís plans for a Republican takeover of Congress.
Unfortunately, they are focusing on the wrong one. Most
commentators spent the morning quoting Obamaís remarks on a black radio
program that a GOP-dominated Congress will result in "hand-to-hand combat."
The reality is most of the action will take place behind their backs and
over their heads. All indications are, if Obama cannot get his
legislative agenda enacted by Congress, he will impose it by decree.

The evidence comes buried elsewhere in todayís L.A. Times
in a piece by Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons under the hum-drum
headline, "Obama Reshapes Administration for a Fresh Strategy."
The story makes clear the "fresh strategy" borders on government by
executive fiat. It begins,

"As President Obama remakes his
senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of
his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on
his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile
Congress."

This rule by divine right of kings is confirmed by no
less an Obama insider than David Axelrod, who said, "Itís fair to say
that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it
is about managing the change that weíve brought." The Times
states candidly:

So the best arena for Obama to
execute his plans may be his own branch of government. That means
more executive orders,
more use of the bully pulpit, and more deployment of his ample regulatory powers
and the wide-ranging rulemaking authority of his Cabinet members.

Nicholas and Parsons note how Obama has replaced the
few appointees with ties to Capitol Hill in place of Chicago insiders.
They specifically state the "the Environmental Protection Agency is
determined to use its regulatory powerÖto begin lowering [carbon]
emissions, in the absence of congressional action." In 2007, the
Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that
the EPA could regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act,
although the act did not have these "pollutants" in mind. Seizing
on this ruling, an anonymous insider who "was not authorized to speak
publicly" told the Times,
"The ambition is to get a reasonable start" on implementing his
extremist vision.

More concerning than the aims to which Obama plans to
use unfettered executive fiat power is the circumvention of Congress,
and the Constitution, in the first place. William Galston of the
Brookings Institution took the
LAT Obama will employ this strategy even if
Republicans do not take back either House of Congress. "Whether or not
the Republicans take over majorities in one or both houses, the margins
will be so much narrower that the strategy of putting together a
Democratic bill and picking off a handful of Republicans to push it over
the top wonít be viable anymore," he said.

Rather than triangulate, repackage his radicalism, or
take an electoral chastening, Obama plans to ram his socialist agenda
down the American peopleís throats "by any means necessary."

There's a popular band at every
Obama rally. There'd be 11 people at this rally except for the
fact that the the hip-hop band The Roots
will "warm up" the crowd. The band was formed in 1987 by Tariq "Black
Thought" Trotter
and Ahmir "?uestlove"
Thompson. They're the real draw.

Obama's War With The American People

Shelagh Gray
says her jaw canít drop any further from things Obama says and does.
Yet somehow, he still manages to deliver what seems to be a daily dose
of shock and awe.

Should the GOP retake the House and Senate as
a result of the November midterms, an article yesterday in the
LATimes.com quotes Obama as saying, "Öwe are going to have just
hand-to-hand combat up here on Capitol Hill."

What? The
continuing undignified and un-presidential phraseology aside, the
comment is a profound demonstration of Obamaís unwillingness to accept
the will of the people. Of course we should expect him to continue
to try to advance his agenda, and he was elected by a large majority,
but if Republicans do indeed retake Congress in the midterms, it will be
because the voters Ö Republicans, Independents, and probably a few
newly-awakened Democrats have decreed it.

Thus, Obama would be
wise to take heed. If "hand-to-hand combat" breaks out on Capitol
Hill -- if Obama refuses to moderate his agenda and the Republicans have
to constantly fight him to enact the will of the voters -- Obama is
quite mistaken if he thinks he will be at war with a Republican
Congress.

Obama will, in fact, be at war with the American
people.

Republicans Will Have to Learn To Get Along
With Me

FoxNews.com is reporting that Obama reveals in
a magazine article that he is weighing what to do if Republicans win the
House majority next month, and has come up with a novel approach: Make
the GOP work with him.

In a seeming twist on the post-1994
midterm calculation made by President Bill Clinton -- when Republicans
pummeled Democrats in the congressional election -- Obama said he thinks
Republicans will have to move in his direction no matter the outcome of
the Nov. 2 vote.

"It may be that regardless of what happens
after this election, they feel more responsible," he is quoted
saying in the Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine, "either
because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, and so the
strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the
sidelines and throwing bombs didn't work for them, or they did
reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be
looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a
serious way."

Accusing the public of mistaking his abilities,
Obama also told the magazine that he's a little taken aback that voters
are disappointed with the current turn of events in his administration.

"The mythology has emerged somehow that we
ran this flawless campaign, I never made a mistake, that we were
master communicators, everything worked in lockstep," Obama is
quoted saying. "That's not how I look at stuff, because I
remember what the campaign was like. And it was just as messy
and just as difficult. And there were all sorts of moments
when our supporters lost hope, and it looked like we weren't going
to win. And we're going through that same period here."

The inside-the-White-House account of trouble and
turmoil in the administration comes 20 days before the midterm election
and is sure to deflate Democrats reluctant to hear the president
detailing mistakes from his first 20 months in office.

"It's
pretty clear to me based on this interview that the president is saying,
'I've given up, You're on your own,'" said Democratic strategist Doug
Schoen.

Among the regrets Obama said he felt during the 111th
Congress is letting Republicans make him out to be "the same old
tax-and-spend liberal Democrat."

This guy is completely out of touch with the mood of the People,
but what is curious is the reference to an, "...inside-the-White-House
account of trouble and turmoil in the administration..."

I Neglected Marketing And PR And Public
Opinion

Mark Hemingway
says, Yes! Obama actually said this in the monster New York
Times magazine piece that just came out:

"We probably spent much more time trying to
get the policy right than trying to get the politics right.
There is probably a perverse pride in my administration -- and I
take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top -- that
we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was
unpopular. And I think anybody whoís occupied this office has
to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy
and politics and that you canít be neglecting of marketing and P.R.
and public opinion."

Oh where, oh where to begin. First, we have
the arrogant assumption that the administrationís crime here is getting
the policy right. The fact that majority of the country that
hates, say, health care reform with the fire of a thousand suns is
presumably because they donít know whatís good for them. Then the
idea that Obama neglected "marketing and P.R. and public opinion."
Obama gave 54(!) speeches on health care reform, including a special
joint session of Congress and prime time infomercial. And yet,
heís still of the opinion he just hasnít explained it properly or
something? Weíre gonna like this turkey any day now! (Also,
the fact heís explaining his policy approach in his eleventy billionth
magazine profile should tell you something -- Obamaís even posed for the
cover of The American Dog.)

Also of note from the profile, Obama
says he now knows "thereís no such thing as shovel-ready projects."
Wait, government is slow to get public works project underway? Who
possibly could have known? Good thing we spent $814 billion to
find that out!

Gateway Pundit
adds,
itís been a year and a half and we all know that the
shovels werenít hitting anything. The stimulus was a
horrible failure.

Even Obama agrees. Obama told the press this week that
there is not such a thing as a shovel ready job.

In the magazine article, Mr. Obama reflects on his
presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like "the
same old tax-and-spend Democrat," realized too late that "thereís no
such thing as shovel-ready projects" and perhaps should have "let
the Republicans insist on the tax cuts" in the stimulus.

Now he tells us.

White House Looks Down On America

The Washington Times
recalls that Mark Twain once joked that Richard Wagner's music was
"better than it sounds." Obama administration officials say in all
seriousness that the economy is better than it seems, if only people
were smart enough to get it.

The same condescending attitude
pervades portrayals of the midterm election as a "revolt of the masses,"
as if peasants wielding torches and copies of the Constitution were
marching on the ivory towers of Washington. MSNBC host Chris
Matthews is able to dismiss Republican women candidates as brainless
cuties without a peep from the professional feminists who undoubtedly
agree with him. These commentators, and Democrats in general, are
indignant that what they see as a collection of bitter rednecks clinging
to guns and Bibles (to paraphrase then-candidate Barack Obama) is set to
destroy the largest congressional governing majority in a generation.

Those who think in such terms are seriously out of touch.
Polling shows that Tea Party activists have above-average educations and
incomes. Many of those who plan to vote against Obama's party are
middle- and working-class moderates who voted Democratic in 2008.
Others are traditionally conservative voters who sat out the last
election but have been newly energized as they see more far-left
policies being implemented. Add to the mix a cohort of newly
mobilized voters, and the "peasants" begin to look like a broad cross
section of America.

If there's one thing that progressives can
never admit to themselves, it's their own unpopularity. So they
seek solace in rationalization. This week, Vice President Joe
Biden asserted that it was "just too hard to explain" the
administration's many accomplishments, presumably because he thinks the
American people are too unsophisticated to understand. Obama's
policies are not causing the problem, he explained; rather, it's the
administration's marketing technique. "[It's] sort of a branding,"
he said, "I mean, you know they kind of want the branding more at the
front end." Meanwhile, Democratic candidates in competitive states
and congressional districts are rebranding themselves as "independents"
to run far away from the White House record -- and, in some cases, their
own record.

It's not so much that the masses are revolting as
that we are seeing the return of the traditional citizen legislator, the
nonprofessional politician who comes to Washington for a brief round of
public service before resuming a private life. It is the model of
Cincinnatus and George Washington, of the Minutemen and Davy Crockett.
The diverse group of new candidates standing in this election more
accurately mirrors the American people than the doddering
representatives of the ancient regime.

The coming election is not
a contest between an all-knowing ruling class victimized by bad
marketing and an ignorant mass of angry, misinformed troglodytes.
It is a referendum on a vision of government and society in which the
state seeks unlimited power to make decisions at the expense of the
liberty of the people. It is a moment of decision on a failed
experiment in governance. If the Obama administration's
accomplishments are too complex to explain to the voters, if the
beneficial effects of their policies are not self-evident, it may be
time for them to question whether they have accomplished anything
worthwhile at all.

Scandal To Be Determined

Jonathan Chatt
says, hear me now and believe me later: If Republicans win and
maintain control of the House of Representatives, they are going to
impeach Obama. They wonít do it right away. And they wonít
succeed in removing Obama -- 67 Senate votes are needed -- but if Obama
wins a second term, the House will vote to impeach him before he leaves
office.

Wait, you say. What will they impeach him over?
You can always find something. Mini-scandals break out regularly
in Washington. Last spring, the political press erupted in a frenzy over the news that the
White House had floated a potential job to prospective Senate candidate
Joe Sestak. On a scale of one to 100, with one representing
presidential jaywalking and 100 representing Watergate, the Sestak job
offer probably rated about a 1.5. Yet it was enough that GOP
Representative Darrell Issa called the incident an
impeachable offense.

It is safe to say that Issaís threshold of what
constitutes an impeachable offense is not terribly high. As it
happens, should Republicans win control of the House, Issa would bring
his hair-trigger finger to the chairmanship of the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee. The Sestak pseudo-scandal disappeared
because there was no process to drive the story forward. Had Issa
been running the Oversight Committee, it would have been the subject of hearings
and subpoenas.

Our Psycho-Babbler-In-Chief

Paul Mirengoff
says
Obama is blaming his political woes, and those of his Party, on the
inability of Americans to "think clearly." But Obama declined to come
down too hard on Americans for being so obtuse. It's not that
we're always stupid; rather the bad economy has clouded our reason:

Part of the reason that our politics seems
so tough right now and facts and science and argument does [sic] not
seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired
not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country
is scared.

Obama did not point out that the height of the
national panic probably occurred in the fall of 2008, when the banking
system seemed to be on the verge of collapse and the stock market was
plummeting. It was then that the nation elected an inexperienced,
smooth-talking leftist to its highest office.

What Obama fails to
grasp here is that arrogance does not sit well with the public under any
economic circumstances. Thus, Obama's self-serving attempt to
reduce the national displeasure with left-liberal governance to an
unwillingness, caused by fear, to permit "facts and science and
argument" (i.e. Obama's position) to win the day is self-defeating.

Perhaps the single biggest complaint against Obama and his Party by
the portion of the electorate that has turned against them is that the
Democrats haven't listened to them, most notably when they pushed
ObamaCare through despite its obvious unpopularity. When Obama
condescendingly accuses voters of disregarding facts, science, and good
arguments, and tops off his disdain by offering a pyscho-physiological
explanation for their defective thinking, he reinforces the very
perception that is driving down his standing.

"The people have
spoken, the bastards," probably captures the sentiment of nearly all
elected officials when public opinion turns against them. But
mature, stable leaders keep this sentiment to themselves, at least while
they are still in office. Only officials who are unfit to lead
openly attribute their political problems to a "national malaise" or to
the hard-wired irrationality of the American people.

Obama Can't Be Wrong, So We Must Be Crazy

David Limbaugh sends this
memo to those who believe Obama is going to move to the center
following his upcoming electoral smack-down: Dream on! Many of you
also told us he wouldn't be that liberal in the first instance. Is
that egg on your face sticky yet?

I'm not denying that Obama
might pretend to move to the center on some issues. As an
accomplished Alinskyite, he'll do what he has to do to move the
socialist football forward. But if he feints to the center, it
will not be real. He will not deviate from his relentless quest to
advance his leftist agenda. And you wouldn't, either, if you had
his warped mindset, God forbid!

This guy isn't just arrogant; he's an elitist,
contemptuous of the unwashed who don't have the mental clarity to see
issues the way he does. It would never occur to him to actually
readjust his policies.

The more we've seen him off prompter the
more we've learned about his heartfelt beliefs. His notorious
"bitter clingers" moment wasn't a verbal slip; it was Obama being
candid. He didn't just say (in effect) that "some people out there
in fly-over country don't share our values but mean well." He
implied there's something wrong with them (us) psychologically,
spiritually and even morally for clinging to their Bibles, their guns
and their antipathy toward people who aren't like them. That is,
they're simple-minded, aggressive bigots.

When Obama runs into
opposition on his agenda, it never occurs to him that he could be wrong.
That's why every time his policies are rebuffed, he reacts the same way:
"They don't understand my plan. It's too complicated. I
haven't given enough speeches on the subject or spoken to people about
their core values. I want the people to take another look at my
plan."

This signature Obama arrogance reared its head again this
past weekend, when Obama said that Americans' "fear and frustration" are
what is driving their opposition to his agenda. The difficult
economic times, which, of course, he blamelessly inherited, are
interfering with the people's ability to "think clearly."

But
fear not. He selflessly agreed to undertake the burden of breaking
"through the fear and the frustration people are feeling." Hmm.
What do you suppose he might say differently in his hundredth approach
to this that he didn't cover the first 99 times?

According to
Obama, people can deal with Bush-induced "trauma" concerning the economy
one of two ways. They can either push "away challenges" and look
"backwards" or "meet these challenges" and "move forward."

Don't
just casually pass over these words. Savor them for at least a
second, and show me where he exhibits an iota of doubt in his failed
policies. To the contrary, he is saying this is more a perception
problem for the American people than it is their rational reaction to
real problems he has created or exacerbated.

This same dripping
condescension is present in his many iterations of the foreign money
slander -- his deliberately manufactured tale that the Chamber of
Commerce is fomenting angst and buying the upcoming elections with
foreign money. (It's interesting that Democrats are reportedly
receiving twice as much foreign campaign dough as Republicans.)

At his recent "youth town hall" meeting, Obama suggested that "what has
happened is layered on top of some of that general frustration that has
expressed itself through the TEA Party. There is an awful lot of
corporate money that's pouring into these elections right now." In
the battleground states, he said, "you are being bombarded with negative
ads every single day, and nobody knows who is paying for these ads.
They've got names like 'Americans for Prosperity.'"

Do you fellow
clingers see the recurring theme? It's not just the foreign money;
it's that the American people are just too weak-minded to resist its
influence.

Well, I've got news for Obama and anyone else who is
buying into his smear. I just spoke at two Americans for
Prosperity TEA Party events a few weekends ago, and the attendees are
hardly dupes being spoon-fed by some foreign-sponsored group -- too
laughable for words. They are self-motivated patriots, outraged by
government's power abuses, assaults on their liberties and policies
bankrupting the nation.

Regarding the TEA Party protesters, Obama
is merely projecting his own antipathy for people who aren't socialists
like him. They are not mindless robots divorced from control of
their mental faculties. They know full well what he's doing and
how disastrous it is for the country, and they're fighting back.

Given the "trauma" Obama will be experiencing the day following the
elections, we probably can't expect him to clearly comprehend the
voters' resounding message. But everyone else will get it.
They already do.

Obama Is Smarter Than You

The Washington Times
says condescension won't prove a very effective campaign tool.

Obama was elected by a country that doesn't deserve to be ruled by
someone as enlightened as he is -- or so he thinks. Last weekend,
as it became increasingly evident that Obama's political party is headed
for historic losses in the midterm elections, he offered his explanation
for the electorate's thanklessness. "Part of the reason that our
politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument
does [sic] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're
hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared," he told
attendees at a Democratic fundraiser. "And the country's scared,
and they have good reason to be."

This is Barack at his most
self-absorbed. On his side are facts, science and argument; his
opponents, by implication, appeal to myth, irrationality and
demagoguery. His brain trust brings moral clarity and intellectual
certainty; his opponents are backward-looking knuckle-draggers.
This is the only way he can explain the ingratitude of the American
people toward his benevolent regime.

It's not a new tone for this
guy. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama sniffed at those sad
unfortunates who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as
a way to explain their frustrations." During April 15 tax
protests, a smug Obama said he was "amused" at the rallies, snickering,
"You would think they would be saying 'thank you.'" To the
philosopher king who occupies the White House, those who oppose his wise
rule are selfish, insolent dolts.

Obama's strange
pseudo-biological assertion that people are "hardwired not to always
think clearly" when they are scared isn't true. Fear can be a
rational response to an imminent threat, and for some people a crisis
brings clarity. The "fight or flight" instinct kicks in, and what
puzzles Obama are the vast numbers of Americans who have chosen the
former.

This is the first time Obama has had to cope with
reasoned and principled opposition to his fashionably leftist ideas.
Barack Obama has lived in a bubble of acclaim where he was always the
kid being praised for how bright he was. He was elevated through a
formal education process in which his race, glibness and charisma were
more than adequate substitutes for hard work. His professional
life as a "community organizer" and machine politician in heavily
Democratic areas required nothing more than appealing to those who
already agreed with him. His entry to the White House came in the
wake of an unpopular presidency and in the midst of an economic crisis,
and he floated into office on waves of hope and change rhetoric
promising miracles that perhaps even he believed he could deliver.

It makes twisted sense that Obama has no idea why the electorate has
rejected his sincere efforts on their behalf. Because he and his
party's policies cannot be blamed, he seeks succor in the notion that
the voters opposing him are simply red-state redneck rubes. As
Vice President Joe Biden recently bellyached, they would tell the
doubting public how good they have it, but it's "just too hard to
explain."

We can at least agree with Obama that the country has
good reason to be scared. The last 22 months have seen a riot of
government expansion into every aspect of American life. The
housing crisis has not abated and by some measures has grown worse.
The value of the dollar has plummeted. Government debt is at
record levels and will remain there for the foreseeable future.
The economy is sputtering, the stimulus failed to stimulate, job losses
are deeper and will last longer than any economic downturn since World
War II. Obama blames this continuing mess on the Bush
administration, on factors out of his control, or on anyone but himself.
Facts, science and argument disagree.

Obama Uses Teleprompter In Task Force
Meeting

Rush Limbaugh
comments -- "I've got a picture of it. Here is a picture
of Obama addressing his own Middle Class Task Force using a
teleprompter. Right here, Snerdley. 'Obama addresses dozen
members of Middle Class Task Force,' and there's the teleprompter.
I see the teleprompter screens, and I see Larry Summers sitting around
here and some of the other people. It looks like... Well, I
can't tell who, but there are 12 of them. Biden was in charge of
it, and there you have it. Middle Class Task Force, one of his own
subgroups, and he's speaking to them with a teleprompter."

Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, both liberal
Democrats, say that Obama's post-partisan America has disappeared,
replaced by the politics of polarization, resentment and division.

In a Univision interview on Monday, Obama, who campaigned in 2008 by
referring not to a "Red America" or a "Blue America" but a United States
of America, urged Hispanic listeners to vote in this spirit: "We're
gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand
with us on issues that are important to us."

Recently, Obama
suggested that if Republicans gain control of the House and/or Senate as
forecast, he expects not reconciliation and unity but "hand-to-hand
combat" on Capitol Hill.

What a change two years can bring.

We can think of only one other recent president who would display
such indifference to the majesty of his office: Richard Nixon.

We write in sadness as traditional liberal Democrats who believe in
inclusion. Like many Americans, we had hoped that Obama would
maintain the spirit in which he campaigned. Instead, since taking
office, he has pitted group against group for short-term political gain
that is exacerbating the divisions in our country and weakening our
national identity. The culture of attack politics and demonization
risks compromising our ability to address our most important issues --
and the stature of our nation's highest office.

Indeed, Obama is
conducting himself in a way alarmingly reminiscent of Nixon's role in
the disastrous 1970 midterm campaign. No president has been so
persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall.
He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and
-- directly from the stump -- candidates running for offices below his
own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they
are "reacting just to fear" and faulted his own base for "sitting on
their hands complaining."

Kyle-Anne Shiver says one can only shake their
head in wonder at why Barack Obama, the brilliant-beyond-brilliant
presidential candidate, has flopped so badly in the same type of
campaign-stump venues he enchanted with fairy dust a mere two years ago.

Perhaps, as he opined himself in The Audacity of Hope, the throngs
loved him in '08 because he was a "blank slate" upon whom voters cast
their own pictures. Now that he has an actual record of
governance, his audiences are no longer fodder for easy bamboozling.
In '08, the people saw what they wanted to see; reality bites back in
2010.

Or perhaps Obama's current flop is the natural result of
overexposure through constant in-your-face public appearances, even on
entertainment television, so that his once-exceptional aura has hit the
trash-bin of history. Familiarity breeds contempt; force-fed
familiarity breeds a national demand for barf bags.

However,
anyone who knows even a smidgen of Alinsky-style community organizing
philosophy sees our community organizer in chief as exactly what he was
trained to be. Both off the stump and on it, the community
organizer is not a doer, but a talker. The community organizer is
condescending and arrogant, but he is so far above the station and
education of those he is sent in to organize that he gets away with his
arrogance.

The community organizer is hired by outsiders to
infiltrate a town considered by others ripe for organizing. The
organizer's first priority is to ingratiate himself with the community
insiders. To this end, he is instructed to employ manipulative
tools, such as adopting the locals' dialects and particular phraseology.
He is taught to adapt purposely and sell himself as one of them.
The organizer's job is always one of deception -- from start to finish.
Deceit is the organizer's middle name.

Second, the organizer is
tasked with "rubbing raw the sores of discontent." He is to take
any complaint he overhears and blow it out of proportion, talking about
it to no end, never letting up on the horrors of the people's plight.

Once the people are agitated, angry, and so aggrieved that they
are downright desperate, the organizer steps in with the carrot of
"hope."

And in the organizer's bevy of solutions, there is but
one answer to desperation, one available source of "hope" for the
people: government money.

Alex Weprin
says Obama has really been making the rounds in the days leading up
to the midterm elections. Last week he appeared on "The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart," and this week he goes mano-a-mano against arguably
his toughest opponent yet -- Ryan Seacrest.

Yes, the "American
Idol" and radio host will interview Obama this morning, according to a
post on Seacrestís facebook page.

As he wraps up weeks of urging
potential voters to get to the polls on midterm election day, Obama will
join 'On Air with Ryan Seacrest' for an exclusive interview on the state
of the nation and life in the White House.

A sampling of the
tough questions being submitted by Facebookers:

Ask
him, regarding to Halloween, if he has any experience with the ghost of
Abe Lincoln or what he has heard about any ghost story in the white
house!!

What do you think about Justin Bieber???

Do you
watch Hawaii Five-0?

Yeah, there are some serious questions too, but these
are more fun.

In all seriousness, the strategy of skipping the
major news organizations makes sense. Obama will probably face
easier questions, and fewer follow-ups, than if were being interviewed
by Chuck Todd, or Katie Couric or Chris Matthews.

Will it make a
difference come Tuesday evening? That remains to be seen.

GOP To Urge Obama Officials Not To Shred
Documents

Jordy Yager and Bob Cusack say Republicans are
likely to urge the Obama administration not to shred documents as they
transition to the House majority.

Before the election, GOP
officials on Capitol Hill privately discussed the issue but refrained
from publicly tackling it, not wanting to assume what would happen on
Election Day. Now that Republicans will control the House, the shredding
matter will move front and center.

No one is accusing the Obama
administration of destroying documents, but Republicans are expected to
try to ensure that all records -- on a range of issues -- are kept
intact.

Darrell West, a political scientist and director of
governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Republicans likely
will formally ask the administration not to shred or delete any relevant
documents that could be requested in a congressional probe.

"Thatíll happen right away, because they want to make sure that the
documentary record is preserved so that they have something to
investigate," said West.

Armed with the House majority,
Republicans next year will enjoy subpoena power -- something they have
not had in four years.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), poised to
become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,
worked closely with the media in the 111th Congress.

Earlier this
year, when it was pointed out by a reporter that he didn't have subpoena
power, Issa responded, "I have you." Issa then singled out other
reporters in the hallway, saying, "I have him, and her, and him."

John Wonderlich, the policy director for the Sunlight Foundation --
a nonpartisan group that promotes government transparency -- said
Republican-led investigations may be initiated more slowly than
expected, because the party doesnít want to be seen as too aggressive.

"[Asking for the retention of documents] is the sort of thing that
wouldnít surprise me at all, but as an opening volley that could be seen
as really aggressive," said Wonderlich. "And immediately, both sides are
going to be posturing to look like the reasonable ones with the open
hand. So itís not like itís going to be open season right away."

Why would anybody be concerned
that Obama would shred, or otherwise hide documents? Hmmmm!

That seemed to be
Obama's reaction yesterday to the stunning rout his party suffered
Tuesday -- when voters sent Democrats packing by the truckload, handing
the House to the GOP. And nearly the Senate as well.

Memo to
POTUS: Pretending nothing happened won't erase Tuesday's results, but it
does make us wonder: Just what will it take to get Obama to hear the
anger of the American people?

"Some election nights are more fun
than others," Obama conceded. "Some are exhilarating; some are
humbling." Eventually, he grudgingly termed Tuesday's results a
"shellacking."

But a repudiation of his policy choices? A
need to shift course or compromise? Don't be silly.
Obama's view: "People are frustrated . . . with the pace of the economic
recovery," he said. And that's pretty much it.

As for the
year-plus that he and the Democrats spent ramming through an unworkable,
grossly expensive health-care plan? It was "the right thing to do."

The trillion-dollar stimulus package that boosted the economy not
one lick? Just a "temporary" measure.

And by the way, said
Obama, let's not "spend the next two years re-fighting the political
battles of the last two." No -- wouldn't want to do that.

And how about the sleazy, wholly undemocratic manner in which he and
fellow Democrats conduct daily business -- particularly on legislative
issues? Well, OK, he said, it's true that "when you are
navigating through a House and a Senate in this kind of pretty partisan
environment that it's [an] ugly mess." But then, Democrats had no
choice.

Right.

Obama can plug his ears if he likes,
refuse to acknowledge voters' wholesale rejection of his agenda and
brush compromise to the side. But such arrogance will lead only to
more conflict -- and more bad news for the nation.

Related:Obama admits he got a
"shellacking," but shows no sign of budging on core agenda

Related:Obama: I Take Credit For Voter FrustrationÖ But Iím
Not Changing

Obama Will Fight GOP

NewsMax.com
says that Obama may have expressed humility during his conciliatory
news conference Wednesday over the shellacking he took in the midterm
elections, but just hours after speaking to the nation, he made it very
clear in a phone call to left-leaning activist group MoveOn.org that he
is not willing to compromise his core beliefs.

"We always knew
bringing about change in Washington wouldnít be easy, and it might get
tougher in the days ahead," Obama told the liberal organization's
supporters a day after Republicans won the House in a landslide.
"The message I took away from the elections is very simple: The American
people are still frustrated. They still want change; we just have
to work harder to deliver the change the American people want."

Obama said he and activist organizations like MoveOn.org must work
harder pushing the progressive agenda "until every American sees real
change in their own lives . . . We didnít sign up for doing what was
easy, we signed up for doing what was right," he said of his policies to
fix America. "We are going to continue to take all the time it
takes ĖĖ and all the effort it takes ĖĖ to get our country back on
track."

Obama wants MoveOn.org to keep the spirit of hope and
change alive because it helps him translate that spirit into
accomplishment.

"To those who began the journey with me almost
four years ago, think about how far weíve come," Obama said.
"Think about the ups and downs we went through during the course of the
campaign. There were times when folks counted us out and we always
came back. The same thing is going to happen over the next two
years, and the next six years."

"...until
every American sees real change in their own lives.

Remember, "change" is Obama's euphemism for socialism.

The Most Arrogant Man He Ever Met

Jake Tapper
says you may recall that during Obamaís vacation at Marthaís
Vineyard, on August 27 he took in a round of golf at the Vineyard Golf
Club in Edgartown, playing golf with New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg; Democratic lawyer, business man and ťminence grise Vernon
Jordan; and White House trip director (and former golf pro) Marvin
Nicholson.

The pool report at the time said that "We are told
Bloomberg and Obama talked in the clubhouse for about 15 minutes about
the economy. They then went to the driving range."

Apparently -- at least from a second-hand report -- the Obama-Bloomberg
conversation could have gone better.

In an interview with The
Australian Financial Review, conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch
says ''Bloomberg said it was a pleasant day. In conversation he
put a few ideas Ö He said it was like verbal ping pong."

Bloomberg, according to Murdoch, "came back and said 'I never met in my
life such an arrogant man'".

A spokesman for Bloomberg did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.

Murdoch -- the
Australian-born founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of News
Corporation, which owns conservative media outlets ranging from Fox News
Channel to the New York Post -- is described by The Age as saying in the
interview that Obama "might make great speeches but doesn't get things
done and doesn't listen to anybody."

"Itís Not Going To Happen Like That"

Peter Andrew says the lefty liberal pundits
continue to fill their media onslaught today with talk of compromise.
I wonder if they mean the GOP should compromise with the Dems the same
way Obama compromised with the GOP when he won in 2008?

It was
the great Obamanator who told republicans they had to stop listening to
Rush Limbaugh and then added his memorable quote on bipartisanshipÖ

"I won, itís not going to happen like that."

Letís be honest. The only reason the
lame-stream media storyline is "Compromise" is because the GOP won.
How many remember hearing cries of the need for compromise when Nancy
Pelosi reached out a hand to republicans and saidÖ

"If there is somebody who is disgruntled, so
be it. But we have an overwhelming vote."

Both comments were made by the compromising
democrat leaders in January of 2009Ö right after their huge win over
Republicans. Interesting. Now the GOP has a huge win over
the Socialists and the anti-Sarah Palin crowd wants to convince you that
Americans want compromise!!! How convenient!

Donít you
believe it!

Obama Submits America To The Worldís Most
Despicable Regimes

Anne Bayefsky
says the Obama administration got a new "shellacking" this morning,
this one entirely voluntary. In the name of improving Americaís
image abroad, it sent three top officials from the State Department to
Genevaís U.N. Human Rights Council to be questioned about Americaís
human rights record by the likes of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

This was the first so-called "universal periodic review" of human rights
in the U.S. by the Council, which the Obama administration decided to
join in 2009. The move represents a striking departure from prior
American foreign policy, which has been to ratify selected human rights
treaties after due consideration and submit American policy-makers to
recommendations based on well-conceived standards accepted by the United
States.

But in the three-hour inquisition which took place this
morning, Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor responded with "thanks to very many of the delegations
for thoughtful comments and suggestions" shortly after Cuba said the
U.S. blockade of Cuba was a "crime of genocide," Iran "condemned and
expressed its deep concern over the situation of human rights" in the
United States, and North Korea said it was "concerned by systematic
widespread violations committed by the United States at home and
abroad."

According to the Councilís procedure, all U.N. members
are given carte blanche to comment and make recommendations to the state
in the docket. But since only three hours are allotted per state,
the practice has emerged of allowing approximately only the first sixty
to speak.

This morning fifty-six countries lined-up for the
opportunity to have at the U.S. representatives, many standing in line
overnight a day ago in order to be near the top of the list.
Making it to the head of the line were Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran,
Nicaragua, Bolivia, and North Korea.

Recommendations to improve
the U.S. human rights record included Cubaís advice to end "violations
against migrants and mentally ill persons" and "ensure the right to food
and health."

Iran -- currently poised to stone an Iranian woman
for adultery -- told the U.S. "effectively to combat violence against
women."

North Korea -- which systematically starves a captive
population -- told the U.S. "to address inequalities in housing,
employment and education" and "prohibit brutalityÖby law enforcement
officials."

Libya complained about U.S. "racism, racial
discrimination and intolerance."

In response to the many
Guantanamo-related criticisms, the State Departmentís top legal adviser,
Harold Koh, blamed the failure to close the facility on others:
"President Obama cannot close Guantanamo alone. That also involves
our allies, the courts, and our Congress."

The U.S. delegation
was at pains to impress the international crowd. Esther Brimmer,
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Organizations, told the
assembled: "it is an honor to be in this chamber."

The Obama
administration has until Tuesday to decide if it accepts or rejects the
recommendations. The whole list of criticisms and recommendations,
as well as the U.S. response, will be put together in a document
distributed globally by the U.N. for the future edification of
America-bashers around the world.

Administration officials are
attempting to spin the exercise as one of justifiable and cathartic mea
culpa on the world stage. But the impression they really left was
one of moral and cultural relativism in which American leadership has
been squandered to the detriment of victims suffering egregious human
rights violations worldwide.

Obama hates America, and he demonstrates this hatred every chance he
gets. That's why he's working so hard to turn America into Cuba.

US President No Longer "Most Powerful Person
On Earth"

Lady Liberty
says the hits just keep on coming! As if the news of Tuesdayís
midterm elections wasnít bad enough, Forbes has announced that Obama has
been knocked off the top spot of their annual list of the "Most Powerful
Persons On Earth."

Obama has been replaced by Chinese President
Hu Jintao as "The Most Powerful Person On Earth." According to
Forbes, the prerequisite to be chosen for their list is "because, in
various ways, they bend the world to their will".

Mr Hu topped
their list because, as Forbes wrote, "Unlike Western counterparts, Hu
can divert rivers, build cities, jail dissidents and censor internet
without meddling from pesky bureaucrats, courts. Recently surpassed
Japan to become the worldís second-largest economy both in absolute and
purchasing power terms. Credible estimates have China poised to
overtake US as worldís largest economy in 25 years -- although,
crucially, not on a per-capita basis."

The Telegraph (UK) says,
"The list, another blow to the US president, cited his partyís poor
performance in the midterm elections.

"Obamaís Democrats suffered a mighty blow in
US midterm elections, with the president decisively losing support
of the House of Representatives, and barely holding onto the Senate.
Itís quite a comedown for last yearís most powerful person, who
after enacting widespread reforms in his first two years in office
will be hard-pressed to implement his agenda in the next two."

Way to go
Barry!

Obama Is Isolated

Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei say Barack Obama
has performed his act of contrition. Now comes the hard part,
according to Democrats around the country: reckoning with the simple
fact that heís isolated himself from virtually every group that matters
in American politics.

Congressional Democrats consider him
distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday.
Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive
and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel
maligned by his holier-than-though take on their profession. His
own cabinet -- with only a few exceptions -- has been marginalized.

His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse.
Obama has suggested itís a PR problem but several Democratic officials
said CEOs friendly with Obama walk away feeling heís indifferent at best
to their concerns. Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the
media and, most importantly, most voters and itís easy to understand why
his own staff leaked word to POLITICO that they want Obama to shake up
his staff and change his political approach.

It should be a
no-brainer for a humbled Obama to move quickly after Tuesdayís thumping
to try to repair these damaged relations, and indeed, in India Sunday,
he acknowledged the need for "midcourse corrections."

But many
Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware
enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed -- in
his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.

In his effort to change Washington, Obama has failed to engage
Washington and its institutions and customs, leaving him estranged from
the capitalís permanent power structure -- right at the moment when
Democrats say he must rethink his strategy for cultivating and nurturing
relations with key constituencies ahead of 2012.

"This guy swept
to power on a wave of adulation, and he learned the wrong lessons from
that," said a Democratic official who deals frequently with the White
House. "Heís more of a movement leader than a politician. He
needs someone to kick his ass on things large and small, and teach him
to be a politician."

David Limbaugh says many commentators are
speculating whether Obama will move to the center or "triangulate" in
order to salvage part of his agenda and increase his chances for
re-election. I don't believe he has either the inclination to move
or the political skills to successfully pretend to (or otherwise
outmaneuver Republicans), which leads me to conclude his re-election
will depend less on his shenanigans and more on how the GOP acquits
itself.

Dick Morris recently argued that Obama will not be able
to move to the center or triangulate "because -- even if he wanted to --
he can't. The issues today are very different from those that
separated the parties in 1994 and do not lend themselves to common
ground." I agree with Dick but also think there's more to it.

Every indication is that Obama is utterly intransigent and will
continue to butt his head against the leftward wall. But even if
he were to employ head fakes to the contrary, he couldn't pull them off.
He doesn't have the political skills in his whole body that Bill Clinton
has in his pinkie.

The way Obama stormed onto the political
scene, excited crowds, caused women to faint, and annihilated the
Clinton machine led to the perception that he is a peerless campaigner,
but I reject it.

There is no question that his shtick, backed up
by a highly oiled and ruthless cabal of veteran community organizers,
worked the first time around. But given what's transpired since,
could it ever work for him again? I think not.

His
carefully choreographed messianic mystique, coupled with his lack of an
executive record, nicely accommodated his platitudinous promises of hope
and change. But now we have his record -- confirming his
unambiguously liberal background, associations and legislative record
(all of which his useful enablers refused to acknowledge) -- and it
violently contradicts his platitudes. We have watched him in
action, and he's no conciliator; he's a petty partisan bully. He
brought not Utopia, but misery; he displayed not "bipartisanship," but
hyper-partisanship; he did not end racial discord, but exacerbated it.

Unfortunately for Obama, but fortunately for America, Obama has only
one play in his policy playbook (extreme liberalism) and one method of
running it (Alinskyite strong-arming). He has proved himself
congenitally incapable of the slightest flexibility or adaptability.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell say Obama should
not seek reelection in 2012, and must decide now how he wants to govern
in the two years leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

In
recent days, he has offered differing visions of how he might approach
the country's problems. At one point, he spoke of the need for
"mid-course corrections." At another, he expressed a desire to
take ideas from both sides of the aisle. And before this month's
midterm elections, he said he believed that the next two years would
involve "hand-to-hand combat" with Republicans, whom he also referred to
as "enemies."

It is clear that Obama is still trying to reach a
resolution in his own mind as to what he should do and how he should do
it.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the
faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy
struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety
about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the
opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation
once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must
be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national
interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we
believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a
candidate for reelection in 2012.

If Obama goes down the
reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a
time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will
be a one-termer, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of
2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending
the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and
common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly.
But it is clear, we believe, that Obama has largely lost the consent of
the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum
on Obama. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican
vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote
of no confidence in Obama and his party. Obama has almost no
credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the
serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that,
for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we
face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment -- or of the
2012 campaign.

Quite simply, given our political divisions and
economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible.
Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the
consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments
in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.

Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really
good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He
now has the chance to deliver on that idea.

Thomas Lifson
says Barack Obama's global stature has taken a catastrophic fall, as
evidenced by his latest trip overseas. Even the New York Times
cannot avert its eyes from the disastrous decline in his (and therefore
America's) influence: Obama's economic view is rejected on world stage:

Obama's hopes of emerging from his Asia trip
with the twin victories of a free-trade agreement with South Korea
and a unified approach to spurring global economic growth ran into
resistance on all fronts Thursday, putting Obama at odds with his
key allies and largest trading partners.

Germany (which has recovered nicely from the global
financial meltdown by shunning stimulus spending) rejects him out of
hand: "Germany rebuffs Obama on trade gap"

In one-on-one meetings with the heads of the
U.S.'s biggest nemeses on trade issues at a Group of 20 economic
powers meeting in Seoul, Obama pressed his case for trying to curb
ballooning trade deficits and surpluses to help prevent another
financial collapse like the one that toppled the world economy in
2008.

But Mrs. Merkel shut the door on any concrete
commitment from Europe's export engine to limit its large trade
surpluses to 4 percent of economic output -- a proposal floated by
the U.S. in behind-the-scenes negotiations.

Foreign leaders have taken the measure of Barack
Obama, and found him a lightweight, a head of state whose proposals can
be dismissed as substance-free fantasies, unworthy of serious
consideration. American voters should take note of this, for
nobody understands a national leader better than his or her peers.
Foreign leaders are also immune to the blather of the American
propaganda media.

We have a serious problem when the leader of
the free world carries no weight. America has two more dangerous
years with this poseur, this dabbler of an ideologue at the helm.

The Little Obama Who Couldn't

Lame Cherry
says the billion dollar baby, Barack Hussein Obama, (200 million a
day........so I guess that makes him the 2 billion dollar baby or
political bastard not claimed by Europe, Asia, or America now.), really
is part of the eunuch corps now.

Obama in India gave away nuclear power, UN seats and 600 million dollars
in vacation bucks.........and didn't get one job for Americans.

Then Obama went to Indonesia...........and didn't put out the volcanic
fires there, but we did find out Obama had a lesbian nanny, and was the
kid who ran like a duck, according to locals.

Then there was
.....South Korea, where Obama got told to get stuffed by everyone as no
one wanted his policy of destruction, and now Obama has made the Chicom
cannibal regime looking pretty Peking girl enticing.

Somewhere in
this Obama did nothing with Japan, but is apparently making goo goo eyes
at Medvedev and Putin before coming back to America in renewing his
undocumented status.

Oh I almost forgot, some American enemy
launched an intercontinental ballistic missile in California waters to
tell Obama to FU yourself.

It must be stated at this point, that
what Obama and Democrats were bitching about for the 8 years of George
W. Bush is that America was not a partner, not listening to enemies and
allies, and so was unpopular. Well folks, the world has now had 2
years of B. Hussein's way and amazingly America is now humbled,
humiliated and disrespected, and Obama can't even bow his way to a
treaty now.

The reason is, Obama has handed over all the people
of the world to either Russia, Iran or China, and when you have shot
your wad baby, the tyrants don't give jack sh*t who is in the suit, as
they are coming to America to be the new colonists and exterminate you.

America in these few days has gone from a Super Power to an Obama
Whimper. The entire world saw the regime lie about that missile
launch and Obama do absolutely nothing in return.

For the record,
when China knocked down our spy plain in the first weeks of Bush 41, he
paid the bribe, made it go away, and then over the next years made the
Chicoms pay in spades in dirty tricks from Tibet to Gulf War II.
That now has all ended with the kid who runs like a duck, B. Hussein
Obama.

For the record, what the GOP did to Obama on November 2nd,
was nothing compared to what the Eurasians did to Obama on this
vacation. Barack Hussein Obama is now eunuch to the world, and all
he got to bring home was that Muchelle with a bigger johnson than he
has, and that helmet hair she has been wearing.

This is not yet
the utter ruin this blog spoke of almost 2 years ago. This gets
worse children.

I guess it's time for another vacation.

Obama To Redouble Effort On Core Principles

Tahman Bradley
is reporting that en route back to Washington after a 10-day trip
overseas, Obama was introspective about his first two years in office.
He told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had an "obsessive focus"
on policy and he will now "redouble" efforts to get back to his core
principles.

Got that "his
core principles." Obama's core principles are found in the
writings of Marx (philosophy) and Alinsky (process).

Obama said he "neglected" things that matter a lot to Americans in
his rush to get major legislation passed. He explained those
things as maintaining a bipartisan tone, dealing with earmarks, making
sure that policy decisions are fully debated and shaping public opinion.
He can better focus on these principals now, Obama explained, because
the economy is more stable.

Bipartisan? Policy fully debated? More stable? He's
nuts!

Obama plans to meet with Congressional
leadership this week and said he expects that even though his party lost
badly in the midterm election, Republicans will work with him to get
things done.

For two years,
Obama has told the Republicans to "take a Dudley," now he expects their
support. Not hardly!

"I am very confident that
the American people were not issuing a mandate for gridlock," Obama
said. "They want to see us make progress."

Progress! Socialism!
The American People want no such thing. He's delusional.

Obama repeated his belief that the country canít afford to extend
the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 a year, saying,
"I believe it is a mistake for us to borrow $700 billion to make tax
cuts permanent for millionaires and billionaires," he said.

And how come he never mentions
the "thousandaires," those earning between $250,000 and $999,999, that
are going to be creamed by Obama's redistribution.

Obama's
millionaires and billionaires have paid professionals to help them
defend their money from the taxman.

The people that Obama will
hurt are the little guys -- your local grocers, cleaners, restaraunteurs,
hardware and auto repair guys, dentists, physicians, etc. They're
the ones that stand to lose the most.

Reflecting on his stop in Asia, Obama said he leaves with the impression
that America will need to step up its game because countries across the
Asian continent are working to better educate their workforces, rebuild
their economies and enter into new markets around the world.

How in the hell is America going to
step up its game when Obama wants to hobble the country with taxes,
regulation, quantitive easing and redistribution?

The
answer is he doesn't. He believes America's wealth is stolen, and
should be returned to those from which it was stolen -- minorities,
workers (unions), and the third world.

Obama Stood His Ground

Ulsterman
says this email is the most recent communication we received from
the "White House Insider." Though brief, it suggests Obama is
clearly suffering from considerable doubt and uncertainty as he prepares
for his third year of usurpation, and a Democratic Party that continues
to wage war among its own.

Hello again. Assume you noted all of
the incoming by Democrats against Pres? Of particular note is
that of Doug S [Doug Schoen]. Doug has been acting as
Hillaryís gadfly for some time now. Very connected. Very
insightful. Very good. One to be feared. I like
Doug. His and Patís [Pat Caddell] open declaration against
President is clear signal Hillary camp fully engaged.
Developing. And gotta love Pat. Heís back in it now!
I strongly suspect they know of Obamaís coming scandal(s).
Foundation being set in place for all out offensive going into 2012.
The DC diaper is full up and in need of a changeÖ

As for
particulars on Obama, much info received this past week. All
pointing to Obama as very upset/angry at treatment by world leaders
and media RE trip. Behind scenes mood "dejected and confused."
Later noted as "emotionally debilitated." Reported outburst
between President and First Lady. What makes this account
unique is that "ÖPresident stood his ground." WH staff
involved in serious protective plan for President regarding incoming
scandal. Very fearful of Issa. Told WH reps have already
visited Issa office several times since election. Promises
made? Issa is bright and loves attention. Could prove
formidable vs White House. Staff sent to Chicago this past
week and DA is heading there on more permanent basis in coming
weeks. Why? Why indeed. PAY ATTENTION.

Lastly RE question on "missile" off CA. I have no -expletive-
clue what that was. Go ahead and file that question with your
Birther question from last time. Any more of these and youíll
be waiting another month or two or ten before we have next sit down.

Talk soon. Maybe. Maybe not.

A Question For Obama

PoliPundit says the next time Obama has one of
his townhall/backyard meetings, I wish someone would ask him the
following question (donít tell the screener youíre going to ask him
this, of course):

Mr. Obama, do you see yourself as the
elected representative of the American people, or do you see your
job as waging a never-ending assault on the American people?

When you have made it mandatory for every American to purchase
health insurance, or pay a fine. Just for the privilege of
breathing.

When your justice department refuses to prosecute
thugs who intimidate voters. Meanwhile, a terrorist who
murdered hundreds of Americans was found "Not Guilty" on those
charges, because you insisted on trying him in a civilian court.

When you have banned the incandescent light bulb, you dictate
how much water can flow through my shower, and you decide how much
water can be flushed by my toilet.

When, in the midst of a
terrible recession, the EPA, and Democrats in Congress are figuring
out ways to make energy costs "skyrocket" -- your words.

When
millions of Americans are struggling to find work, you want to
amnesty millions of illegal foreign workers to compete with them.

A federal jury convicted Ghailani of
one count of conspiracy and acquitted him of 284 other counts, including
murder and murder conspiracy, in the bombings of American embassies in
Africa.

The verdict came after U.S. District Court Judge Lewis
Kaplan barred testimony from a key witness who said he sold dynamite to
Ghailani before the bombings.

The judge had ruled that the
government learned of the witness only through the use of coercive
interrogations at CIA prisons and thus his testimony would taint the
process. Had Ghailani been tried in a military tribunal predicated
on a war setting, most likely that ruling would not have been made.

"I was disappointed that they only got one guilty verdict out of 285
counts," former CIA Director Michael Hayden tells me. "It shows
the challenges of trying to do this in Article III courts with the
traditional rules of evidence. From my professional point of view,
I want foreign terrorists off the battlefield as enemy combatants.
Whether or not they end up in any kind of judicial process is another
matter entirely."

While Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
Jr. have claimed that civilian trials will show the world that we
respect human rights, the White House has leaked word that Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the admitted architect of the 9/11 plot, may never be tried
during Obamaís term of office.

That topsy-turvy position
demonstrates the hypocrisy of Obamaís stance, which in turn goes back to
his desire to play politics with the war on terror and appease his
left-wing constituency.

In a revealing passage in the new book
"Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Bush White House,"
Richard Wolffe quotes an unidentified Obama aide as saying of Obama, "He
reads everything. And I mean everything. Every news story,
every column. Itís driving everyone crazy."

In other words,
Obama is so thin-skinned and obsessed with his image that he spends much
of his time reading about himself. Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitanoís effort to call acts of terrorism "man-caused
disasters" is a symptom of that tendency. By avoiding calling the
enemy by its real name, Obama hopes to enhance his popularity overseas.

After the 9/11 attack, President Bush traveled to ground zero and
stood on a crumpled fire engine with his hand on the shoulder of a
firefighter named Bob Beckwith.

The crowd was shouting they
couldnít hear him. He turned and said, "I hear you, the rest of
the world hears you, and the people who knocked down these buildings are
going to hear from all of us soon."

In deciding to try Ghailani
in civilian court, Obama showed that if he had been on the fire truck
that day, his message would have been quite different.

He
literally would have said that he intends to try the hijackers in
civilian court, not recognizing that they were all dead, ignoring the
fact that al-Qaida had declared war on the U.S.

"The Obama
administration recklessly insisted on a civilian trial for Ahmed
Ghailani and rolled the dice in a time of war," Liz Cheney aptly said
after the verdict. "The Department of Justice says itís pleased by
the verdict. Ask the families of the victims if theyíre pleased.
And this result isnít just embarrassing. Itís dangerous. It
signals weakness in a time of war."

That puts all Americans at
risk.

Obama Using Executive Orders to Implement
Radical Agenda

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
ask, does Obama plan to move to the center in response to his
overwhelming rejection at the polls on Nov. 2? No way!
Instead, he is moving to implement, through executive action, two of the
most controversial items in his 2010 agenda -- a carbon tax and
pollution permit system and a ban on the use of secret ballots in union
elections.

Through executive action by the Environmental
Protection Administration (EPA) and the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB), the Obama administration is planning to effectuate both policies
without asking Congress.

Never mind that he couldn't persuade
even a top-heavy Democratic Congress to pass either program. Or
that public opinion polls show massive rejection of both measures.
Or that each is a sure job killer by itself -- and together, they are
even worse. This arrogant, ideologically driven radical is
determined to have his way, and the public be damned!

The EPA is
currently soliciting public comments for its plan to use the Clean Air
Act of 1970 to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The Clean Air
Act, as the name indicates, is designed to fight against pollution --
unhealthy chemicals that are belched into the air by smokestacks.
It was passed to fight sulfur dioxide, particulates, nitrous oxides and
other chemicals that cause human diseases. To use it to fight
carbon dioxide -- which we all breathe without ill effects -- because of
concerns about global warming is a perversion of the law.

Worse,
because the Clean Air Act is designed to protect public health by
measuring aggregate pollution in each geographic area, it limits
economic development in communities where the pollution levels exceed
prescribed standards. But carbon dioxide doesn't poison anyone.
It makes no sense to ban factory expansion in areas where the nature of
the industries is that there will be high carbon dioxide levels (like
oil area of Texas and Louisiana). But that's what the EPA plans to
do, virtually making economic growth illegal in large parts of the
United States.

Meanwhile, Craig Becker, the former chief counsel
of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- now the head of
the NLRB -- has secured a 3-2 party line majority to repeal the Dana
decision, which mandates secret ballots in unionization elections.
The NLRB will rule that if a majority of workers check off that they
want a union on cards, then the union will automatically be approved
without a secret ballot vote of the entire workforce.

Currently,
if a majority of the workers sign the cards, a secret ballot vote is
then triggered. Frequently, the union loses these elections,
proving that the card check-off is subject to coercion and bullying.
The Democratic majority in the Senate wouldn't approve the card check
change, so the NLRB is planning to accomplish the same objective
administratively, trapping workers into unionization they would reject
if afforded the opportunity to vote by secret ballot.

Both the
pollution permit/carbon tax and the forced unionization proposals will
be job-killers. The U.S. has maintained its 25 percent share of
global manufacturing by replacing workers with energy-driven machines.

In the past 10 years, the number of manufacturing employees has
declined by 33 percent, but our production has risen by 50 percent.
But automation takes energy -- lots of it -- by taxing energy, we are
eliminating the strategy that has preserved our jobs. And massive
unionization of the private sector will also drive out our jobs.
Since 1990, unionized manufacturing jobs have declined by 75 percent.
But non-union manufacturing jobs have actually risen over the same
period by 15 percent.

After he lost Congress in 1992, Bill
Clinton, too, resorted to executive orders to maintain his momentum as
president. With Congress unwilling to pass anything he proposed,
Clinton canvassed the administration for ideas that could be implemented
by executive orders. A very productive period followed, during
which tobacco regulation, higher educational standards, affirmative
action reform and other key measures were implemented without asking
Congress' permission.

But Clinton's executive orders were on
subjects on which Congress had not voted. They did not contradict
the express will of the body. Obama is using the strategy to act
in direct defiance of congressional action. He is passing ideas
Congress refused to pass, even when he had huge majorities.

Obama will live to regret these moves. Republicans in the House
will de-fund these actions and insert legislative language making it a
crime to spend appropriated funds to implement them. By this
strategy, all of the controversial Obama legislation will be at issue
during the budget fight -- taxes, ObamaCare, cap and trade and card
check. The more these issues are inserted into the budget fight,
the greater the chances of Republican victory.

So Obama has not
learned the lessons of 2010 and likely never will.

When A Weak Man Is President

DrJohn says Barack Obama has used his occupation
of the office of POTUS to do little more than weaken the United States
of America and now events are spiraling out of control around both him
and us. His first real focus was to go on an apology tour.

Barack Obama has finished the second leg of
his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he
has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of
America and his predecessors.

Obama told the French (the
French!) that America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even
derisive" toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has "a
moral responsibility to act" on arms control because only the U.S.
had "used a nuclear weapon." In London, he said that decisions
about the world financial system were no longer made by "just
Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy" -- as if
that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S.
had not "pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors"
because we "failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to
progress throughout the Americas."

By confessing our nationís
sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbels said that Obama has
"changed the image of America around the world" and made the U.S.
"safer and stronger." As evidence, Gibbs pointed to the
absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past
weekend.

Stronger by confessing to what Obama believes is
our sins.

Sure.

Obama made clear he does not believe in
the exceptionalism of America

Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in
American exceptionalism. He said he did -- in the same way
that "the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in
Greek exceptionalism." Thatís another way of saying, "No."

Karl Rove was prescient:

When a president desires personal
popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests.
Itís early, but with little to show for the confessions, David
Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the
president planted, cultivated and will harvest "very, very valuable"
returns later.

Rove was dead on correct. Obama was more (and
still is) interested in his own popularity than the welfare of his
country.

Fox News
is reporting that Barack Obama needed 12 stitches in his upper lip
after taking an errant elbow during a pickup basketball game Friday
morning with family and friends visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday,
the White House said (video).

First word of the injury came in a
statement from press secretary Robert Gibbs nearly three hours after the
incident.

The White House did not initially name the person who
caused the injury, but identified him later Friday as Rey Decerega,
director of programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Obama received the stitches under local anesthesia in the doctor's
office on the ground floor of the White House after returning home. Doctors used a smaller filament than typically used, which increases the
number of stitches but makes a tighter stitch and leaves a smaller scar.
The stitches were probably administered by a plastic surgeon for the purpose of
ensuring that no scar remained. If there was no excessive
bleeding, the only thing that would justify stitches is vanity.

This photo is weird. Obama was seen sulking
in his chambers, looking like he wants attention and sympathy (video).

The North and
South Korea are on the brink of war, and this guy is playing games.

Maybe
that elbow to the kisser will knock some sense into him, although I
doubt it.

Undoubtedly, Obama will now claim heís shed blood for
his country. He'll probably give himself a medal.

How Obama Sees Himself -- And Us

Kyle Smith
asks, whatís it like inside the Obama White House? A lot like
what youíd guess from outside the Obama White House.

In
"Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside Obamaís White House," MSNBC
analyst Richard Wolffe, a writer sympathetic to Obama, reports the
prosaic backroom details of the White House struggles from early this
year, but occasionally stumbles upon an off-the-cuff revelation thatís
much more interesting.

One staffer was conspicuously overweight.
Obama, in an incident that Wolffe believes proves how caring the man is,
took it upon himself to present the aide with a salad for lunch -- "then
listened to him protest that he could take care of his own health. 'I
love you, man,' Obama said. 'I want you to look after yourself. Eat the
salad.'"

I love you, man. Eat the salad. That is the
Obama presidency in a plastic see-through clamshell. (Hold the
ranch dressing!) Obama loves us. He knows whatís best for
us. We should bow to his superior wisdom.

Jimmy Carter
obsessed over the White House tennis court schedule. Obama wants
to be your life coach, guidance counselor and spouse, kicking your shins
under the dinner table when you order chocolate cake instead of steamed
celery.

Obama has to deal with transnational terrorism, arms
control, unemployment, the deficit, health care and limiting damage from
the Joe Biden Gaffe-u-tron. Add in the possibility of North Korea
throwing a nuclear tantrum, and it seems unlikely that Obama is going to
have time to follow me into Wendyís. Yet there he is, pushing for
all restaurant chains to post calorie counts, as already required in New
York. Like much of liberalism, this little nudge isnít a terrible
idea, but it does impose a cost on business with little apparent
benefit.

The "eat the salad" command is echoed throughout the
book, which finds Obama in emergency mode at all times and always
convinced that his combination of charisma, intelligence and moral
authority makes him uniquely qualified to solve any problem that has
bedeviled humanity for any number of generations. As Obama sees
the hapless White House underling -- an oaf who has never heard of salad
and has been waiting for a visionary to guide him to the land of arugula
-- he sees the world.

When an earthquake strikes Haiti, Obama
demands immediate action: "Make sure we are moving fast and
aggressively," he says. "I donít want to hear any excuses."
Excuses? Wolffe morosely cites "the inability of the White House,
or any government, to ease Haitiís suffering."

Never mind, Obama
is off to the START negotiations with the Russians, negotiating arcane
details himself. He sprints through the process and pronounces the
treaty done, delivering on his promise to move to "a nuclear-free
world." Now it seems to have as many structural wobbles as Haiti.

A signature Obama line -- economic policy "has less to do with big
government or small government than it has to do with smart government"
-- amounts to proclaiming, "I must be right because Iím brilliant."
Obama evidently feels that his tireless brainwork tidied up the
war-peace problem for the ages in his Nobel Prize speech (peace, we
learned, is desirable but war is sometimes necessary) and that he
wrought a profound new balance on civil liberties by largely retaining
Bush anti-terror policies with the major fix being that, this time, he
is the one in charge (a position Wolffe ably summarizes as, "In other
words, trust me").

Obamaís self-regard is at its most resplendent
when he delivers a remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "I am not bound
to win, but Iím bound to be true. Iím not bound to succeed, but
Iím bound to live up to what light I have." That the words are
actually those of Ronald Reagan is an amusing but trivial detail.

Whatís telling is that Obama set up the remark by saying he takes
great pleasure in the White House library, and that he stumbled upon the
remark in the process of searching out the wisdom of his predecessors.
This was not a true statement. In fact Obama later admitted to
Wolffe that he had found the quotation while reading one of his own
diaries, in which he had mistakenly attributed the Reaganism to Lincoln.

So: In times of worry and strife, Obama looks for comforting
inspiration in the sacred, timeless words of . . . Obama!

Presidents are often accused of surrounding themselves with yes-men and
retreating from the world. Obama doesnít even need the yes-men. He
lives in a hall of mirrors, and heís awed by the view.

Obama Urged To Rule By Executive Order

Jerome Corsi
is
reporting that a prominent leftist think tank suggests Obama ignore
Congress and the American people altogether by enacting a leftist agenda
through executive action.

The Center for American Progress, based
in Washington, D.C., and headed by former Clinton administration Chief
of Staff John Podesta, has issued a series of recommendations regarding
how Obama can implement a progressive agenda in complete disregard of
Congress, now that the Republicans control the majority in the House of
Representatives.

In a daring expose that openly advocates
utilizing presidential executive decisions without regard to new laws
passed by Congress or the will of the American people, Podesta and his
Center for American Progress staff and senior fellows issued this month
a report titled "The Power of the President: Recommendations to Advance
Progressive Change."

"In the aftermath of this month's midterm
congressional elections, pundits and politicians across the ideological
spectrum are focusing on how difficult it will be for President Barack
Obama to advance his policy priorities through Congress," Podesta wrote
in a foreword to the report. "Predictions of stalemate abound.
And some debate whether the administration should tack to the left of
the center and compromise with or confront the new House leadership."

Podesta suggests ignoring Congress and the American people
altogether, recommending instead that Obama enact a leftist agenda
through executive action, utilizing the following prerogatives of the
presidency:

"The ability of President Obama to accomplish
important change through these powers should not be underestimated,"
Podesta stressed. "Congressional deadlock does not mean the
federal government stands still."

Corsi noted, "What Podesta
makes clear is the concept of elevating the presidency into the status
of the first among the three U.S. branches of government and expanding
the powers of the presidency with an imperial resolve remain alive and
well in the Obama White House."

Commanding the armed forces? Just what is Podesta suggesting
Obama do with the armed forces?

Obama's Chickens Come Home To Roost

Paul Mirengoff
says
a front-page story in the Washington Post finds that leading Republicans
have unearthed a previously obscure concept with which to attack Obama.
That concept is "American exceptionalism." The writer, Karen
Tumulty, seems to view this development as part jockeying for position
among presidential hopefuls and part attempt to raise questions about
Obama's Americanism.

Tumulty's first error is to assume that the
concept of "American exceptionalism" is obscure. The term may not
be common, but the view that this is a special nation -- which is, I
believe, supported by overwhelming evidence -- is a staple of American
thought.

Until now, U.S. presidents have consistently
articulated this view, their speechwriters competing to find ways to say
it in novel ways. President Reagan's "shining city on the hill"
probably takes the first-place prize. But think too of George H.W.
Bush's statement (reiterated by Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic
convention) that "America is a special place, not just another pleasant
country somewhere on the UN Roll Call between Albania and Zimbabwe."

If the theme of American exceptionalism generally has been
articulated mainly in "big occasion" speeches, that's because it is
considered a given. And if we are now suddenly witnessing a
drumbeat, that's because Obama has challenged American exceptionalism.

He did so most notably when he stated in France, during his first
trip overseas, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect
that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe
in Greek exceptionalism." Suddenly America was just another
pleasant country like England or Greece.

Obama followed up by
saying that the values in our Constitution are exceptional. But he
also mentioned our "imperfect" faithfulness to these values. And,
though he acknowledged that U.S. leadership in the world is "incumbent,"
he expressed no particular enthusiasm or pride in this role. Thus,
Obama's attempted "walk-back" from his initial put down of American
exceptionalism was incomplete and unsatisfying.

Tumulty also
implies that the comparison to the "Brits and Greeks" is the sole basis
for the claim that Obama rejects American exceptionalism. But
after Michelle Obama said that her husband's progress as a candidate
made her proud of America for the first time in her adult life, Obama's
gloss on her remark took no serious exception to it. And when Rev.
Wright regularly castigated America in his sermons, Obama took no
offense. Oprah Winfrey left Wright's congregation; Barack Obama
did not.

One can understand why the concept of American
exceptionalism underwhelms Obama. As Tumulty notes (per Seymour
Martin Lipset), the concept often has been invoked as an explanation for
why the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not have a
significant socialist movement or Labor party. Much of Obama's
career, especially his many years as a community organizer, strongly
suggests that he is less than comfortable with the fact that the U.S. is
exceptional in this respect. No wonder he put the concept of
American exceptionalism down when asked about it in France.

If
American exceptionalism has indeed become a "conservative rallying cry,"
it means that Obama's chickens have come home to roost.

Unemployment Up, Obama Flees The Country

Joy Tiz
says just as we find ourselves a mere whisper away from double digit
unemployment, our inept Commander in Chief runs off to Afghanistan where
he lectured General Petraeus on how to run a war without winning.

Itís the Christmas season and retailers should be
adding jobs, albeit temporarily. Instead, we lost 28,000 retail
jobs.

Hamid Karzai will be spared a meeting with Obama. A
planned tÍte-ŗ-tÍte was scrapped due to "bad weather."

Secure
video conferencing was also abandoned, but Karzai could still be forced
to listen to Obamaís pontifications via telephone.

Obamaís prized
Deficit Commission has been a complete flop. The new unemployment
numbers are miserable. What else could poor Obama do other than
flee the country and hope it all blows over?

So, Obama traveled
to Afghanistan on a "surprise" visit.

Obama thanked U.S. troops
for their service during a surprise trip to Afghanistan on Friday as
casualties mount since he escalated the war last year.

In a
speech to several thousand troops inside a hangar at Bagram Air Field,
Obama declared that the troops are making important progress in the
country and will succeed in the U.S. mission.

"Weíll never left
Afghanistan be a safe haven for terrorists to attack America," he said,
adding that he didnít need to tell them it was a tough fight and
difficult days are ahead.

Curt
says, that "surprise" had been planned for a month, and occurred on
the very day the new unemployment figures were released showing a rise
in unemployment. Quite convenient for him to be out of the country
on this day seeing as how those numbers are released on the same day
every month, and a visit like this will knock the bad news off the front
pages.

Related:How To Ruin A Photo Op: Obama
Poses With Troops As Really Gay U2 Song Blasts On Live Feed

Related:Obama delegates the job of breaking the bad news to
Joe Biden.

Obama Turns Government Up To 11

Glenn Reynolds says Obama's term so far has
been compared to many fictional and non-fictional characters: Chauncey
Gardener of "Being There" is frequently invoked, along with the
self-invented charmer Don Draper from "Mad Men," and of course there are
the usual tiresome comparisons with Hitler that most presidents face
these days.

But I have a different character in mind.
The more I watch this administration at work, the more I think we're
seeing the first Nigel Tufnel presidency.

Nigel Tufnel, many will
remember, was the fictitious heavy metal guitarist in the fictional "rockumentary"
"This Is Spinal Tap." In a classic scene, he displays his guitar
collection and his special amplifier that -- unlike all other amplifiers
in existence -- has knobs that go all the way up to 11, instead of just
10.

And that's what Obama has done: In his first two years of
governing, he's taken us to 11 in so many ways.

Under Bush and
the Republican Congress from 2000-2006 federal spending was bad, and
many people groused. But Obama has turned it up to 11, running up
trillion-dollar-plus deficits that dwarf the worst we saw under Bush and
the congressional Republicans, and producing open revolt from Tea
Partiers and others.

Under Bush, and previous presidents,
government regulation was creeping up steadily, year by year. But
under Obama, the regulatory knobs have been turned to 11: New health
care laws, a new financial regulation bill, proposals for carbon taxes
and new Environmental Protection Agency regulation of carbon dioxide --
the list seems endless, made even worse by the
near-body-cavity-searching now being done by the Transportation Security
Administration. (Tufnel's grand opus, a bondage-themed album
titled "Smell the Glove," sounds all too close to air-travel reality
now. . . .)

Under Bush, the left complained about the U.S.
campaign in Afghanistan, which candidate Obama characterized as "just
air-raiding villages and killing civilians." But under Obama, air
raids and drone attacks have drastically increased, not only in
Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Obama has
turned the air-raid knob up to 11.

Under Bush and previous
presidents, political friends were rewarded with government money.
But under Obama, the cronyism has been turned up to 11, with General
Motors and Chrysler bondholders stiffed to reward union members, with
massive federal grants (later rescinded) to a voter-fraud ridden ACORN,
and with numerous other special carve-outs for Obama-supporting special
interests.

Under Bush and previous presidents, the Justice
Department was sometimes politicized, but under Obama, the
politicization has been turned up to 11, with blatant favoritism in the
refusal to pursue voter-intimidation charges against the New Black
Panther Party, and with repeated complaints from insiders about the
corruption of the Civil Rights Division.

For Nigel Tufnel,
turning the knobs to 11 was a way to excite the crowd, and Obama's
approach has certainly done that, if not quite in the way that Obama
intended. While many Americans were uneasy about big government
before, Obama's shock-and-awe approach got them downright upset.

Al Gore used to tell the story of a frog in a pot of slowly heating
water, left insensible to the fact that it was being boiled by slow
degrees. Obama turned the knob on the stove to 11, and now the
frog has decided to jump.

Obama's advisers thought that the
sudden introduction of numerous big-government programs would produce a
sort of shock-and-awe effect, paralyzing opposition and getting the
public used to the idea of European style government involvement in
American life. But instead of shock and awe, Obama's approach has
produced shock and action, with the Tea Party movement and other
anti-big-government protests sweeping the nation like wildfire, and
producing the biggest Democratic midterm defeat in generations.

And, like the beleaguered band Spinal Tap, Obama is seeing his appeal
shrink rapidly despite the increased volume -- though his advisers, like
Spinal Tap's manager Ian Faith, protest that his appeal isn't shrinking,
just becoming "more selective." In fact, as it flounders before
the WikiLeaks scandal and the TSA brouhaha, Obama seems to be shrinking,
much like the 18-foot model of Stonehenge that, through a slip of
Tufnel's pen, became an 18-inch model of Stonehenge that left audiences
unimpressed.

But here's where the analogy fails. In the
movie, Tufnel's career was ultimately, saved by a surge of popularity in
Japan. Obama, on the other hand, has pursued policies that seem to
make America likely to suffer Japan's fate, a decade or more of economic
stagnation coupled with massive growth in government debt.

For
Spinal Tap, luck produced a happy ending to a humorous story of
ineptitude and decline. Can Obama expect similar luck?
Sadly, such happy endings are far easier for Hollywood than for
Washington.

Obama Comes Unglued

DrJohn says Barack Obama held a press
conference today. He should have stood in bed. The reviews
are nothing less than brutal:

Rich Lowry:

Surely, if President Obama had been scripted
this afternoon he wouldnít have let loose with such a
self-revelatory rant at the end of his presser. To this point,
the hallmark of Obama has been his bloodlessness and lack of
emotion, in almost any circumstance. North Korea could nuke
Seoul and heíd come out and coolly pronounce it a regrettable event
that proves we need to ratify New START. Weíve learned today
that what really gets under his skin and makes him boil is
criticism, and especially criticism from progressives. Only a
man of the left could care so much about attacks from the left wing.
Only a president who is extremely thin-skinned would let criticism
bother him so much that heíd -- relative to his usual affect --
erupt in anger in public about it. Only someone who
desperately hates the position heís in now, having to try to
accommodate political realities in a center-right country and kiss
his former messiahship goodbye, would show such peevishness.
We got a good look behind the curtain for a moment this afternoon,
and it wasnít pretty.

Peter Wehner :

Mr. Obama has mastered the ability to look both
unprincipled and graceless at the same time. There is also a
touch of bipolarity in this administration that is doing a fair
amount of damage to it.

In the Washington Post this morning,
under the headline "The president extends an olive branch to the
GOP," we read this:

Although his liberal supporters are furious
about the decision, President Obamaís willingness to extend all of
the George W. Bush-era tax cuts is part of what White House
officials say is a deliberate strategy: to demonstrate his ability
to compromise with Republicans and portray the president as the last
reasonable man in a sharply partisan Washington. The move is
based on a political calculation, drawn from his partyís midterm
defeat, that places a premium on winning back independent voters.

Itís not clear to me how referring to a party
that just smashed your own in an epic midterm election as "hostage
takers" is going to help Mr. Obama either win back independents or
appear as "the last reasonable man in a sharply partisan
Washington."

James Taranto says, OK, maybe the World's
Greatest Orator does have a communication problem.

The news that
Obama had struck a deal with congressional Republicans to avert a brutal
tax increase came as a pleasant surprise. We didn't think Obama
had it in him to compromise. It turns out we were right, even
though he has compromised. Having decided to compromise, he has
shown that he hasn't the foggiest idea how to go about doing it.

Consider this exchange with NBC's Chuck Todd from yesterday's White
House press conference:

Todd: Mr. President, what do you say
to Democrats who say you're rewarding Republican obstruction here?
You yourself used in your opening statement they were unwilling to
budge on this. A lot of progressive Democrats are saying
they're unwilling to budge, and you're asking them to get off the
fence and budge. Why should they be rewarding Republican
obstruction?

Obama: Well, let me use a couple of
analogies. I've said before that I felt that the middle-class
tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts. I
think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the
hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of
that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American
people and I was not willing to see them get harmed.

Obama must read the Puffington Host. The
"analogy" is problematic, to say the least. Whereas a
hostage-taker is a criminal, Republicans in Congress are acting in a
perfectly lawful manner. Further, they gained their power through
democracy, not coercion. Hostages do not elect their captors.
And having just been elected, in a vote that was a clear (though not
irrevocable) rebuff of Obama, at least for the moment they have a
stronger claim than he does to be acting on behalf of the American
people.

Accusing your political opponents of hostage-taking is
not an analogy, it is mere rhetorical invective. We don't object
in principle to such inflammatory language (though we won't hold our
breath waiting for a denunciation from the no-labelists and other
"civility" phonies). But the appropriate time to employ it is in
the midst of a political disagreement -- when you're trying to rally
your supporters or turn voters against your adversaries. When
you're announcing and trying to sell an agreement, you act agreeably.
You put your differences aside, at least for the time being.

Perhaps Obama feared that if he did so, he would look weak. In
fact, he looks much weaker for behaving in such a petulantly
confrontational manner. He left no doubt that this agreement goes
against every fiber of his being, that it was forced on him and he
didn't have the strength to resist.

That is, in fact, true.
Because of the timing of the automatic tax increase and the start of the
new Congress, the Republicans' success in last month's election, and the
Democrats' failure to address this matter months ago, he really had very
little choice in the matter. From his standpoint, it was a bad
deal -- and it was also about the best he could get.

But a
professional politician should have known better than to put his
personal feelings on display in such a manner.

The Australian
says US lawmakers voted
yesterday to kill efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for
suspected terrorists in 2011 or try the alleged mastermind of the
September 11, 2001 attacks on US soil.

The House of
Representatives voted 212-206 for a catch-all spending Bill covering
government expenses in the fiscal year that began October 1, a measure
that included the restrictions affecting Guantanamo and its detainees. The legislation prohibits Barack Obama from spending any money to
transfer prisoners to US soil or to acquire facilities to hold them on
US soil.

It also explicitly bars the transfer of the confessed
Al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11, attacks Khalid Sheik Mohammed,
to the US mainland or US territories.

"None of the funds made
available in this or any prior Act may be used to transfer, release, or
assist in the transfer or release to or within the United States, its
territories, or possessions Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other
detainee'' held at Guantanamo Bay as of June 24, 2009, the Bill says.

To become law, the Senate must approve the same legislation, sending
it to Barack Obama to sign into law.

Obama vowed during his 2008
quest for the White House to shutter the notorious facility, and even
signed an executive order shortly after taking office to do so, but ran
into unyielding opposition from the US Congress.

The prison,
located on the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, currently holds around 170
detainees, including three who have been convicted and 58 who have been
placed in indefinite detention without trial. Scores of other
inmates have been transferred to third countries, where they have been
released.

Efforts to try some Guantanamo detainees in civilian
courts were dealt a major blow last month when a jury cleared a former
inmate of all but one of the 286 charges brought against him for the
1998 US embassy bombings in Africa.

Former President Bill Clinton gave a statement after his meeting with
Barack Obama about his tax compromise with the Republicans.

However, after his statement, Clinton began to call on and take
questions from the press with Obama at his side. Obama, clearly
uncomfortable, leaves promptly after a few moments, saying he was
keeping Michelle "waiting."

Obama's gestures were telling:
the crossed arms is one of the worst gestures a public figure can take:
closed, defiant, defensive. Obama looked embattled, weak.

And
check out the flash of teeth just as Obama exits stage right.

To leave your former rival's husband, the former President of the
United States to field questions for you, while you need to go because
your wife is waiting for you. Man, oh man! Wow!! I think
Bill was taken aback as well. This is probably a first﻿ in our
country's history.

The wife is waiting, so instead of doing his
job, Obama bails and lets someone else do the dirty work because he's an
incompetent﻿ moron.

He is not at all able to prioritize. He
apparently thought his duties at the Christmas party were more important
than resolving the tax cut issue, at least that is certainly the message
he gave.

We are in serious danger the next two years. All
because of the media malpractice, and their lying and deceptive biased
reporting that gave us this guy in the first place..

Notice, when
Obama leaves Gibbs stands up, puts his hand out as if "What am I
supposed to do?"

That's exactly how he looked. The hands
out gesture was a shrug and his mouth was stretched in a frown.
There was a hint of defiance in it, expressing "I warned you it could
end like this.

Obama basically just told the country, and the
world -- he's not up to the job.

What Happened During The Clinton-Obama
Closed Door Meeting?

Ulsterman has another communication from Deep Throat II
about Obama and Clinton's two hour White House meeting. Here is an
extract:

Reportedly, after the cordialities were dispensed with,
Bill Clinton began a rather determined dissertation on the many wrongs
the Obama administration had undertaken against fellow House and Senate
Democrats over the course of the last year. Obama listened, even
agreeing at times, but all the while clearly expressing his primary
concern was to get a public mention of support by Bill Clinton for the
tax deal compromise. Clinton indicated he would be willing to do
so, while also urging Obama that today may in fact be the best time to
make that announcement. Once his public support was given, Clinton
would then reach out to those members of Congress he continues to enjoy
strong relationships with, and obtain assurances they would support the
Obama tax plan proposal. Obama is said to have indicated agreement
that the sooner the Clinton support was made public, the better.

Here is where the information gets most interesting. After White
House staff and the Press Corps scrambled to prepare for the impromptu
press conference, and after Obama gave yet another brief, halting, and
clearly uncertain explanation of the tax rate proposal, replete with a
multitude of umms and uhs, and staring down at the floor, Obama
indicated he was going to let Bill Clinton "speak briefly." Where
Obama had spoken to the press for less than 3 minutes, Bill Clinton took
center stage and spoke, without teleprompter, and with a concise and
authoritative understanding of issues ranging from tax rates to Haiti,
for the next half hour.

Clinton began his remarks by stating he
spends about an hour a day trying to understand this economy, so he can
figure out what to do. Clinton went on to expound upon the
essentials of the agreement, and defend its implications -- in essence,
appearing to have far more understanding of the Obama tax compromise
than Obama himself. There were likely more than a few members of
the press wondering if Obama had yet even read his own tax proposal
agreement. At the 6:35 mark [in the video], Obama made his first
attempt to cut off Bill Clinton and take back the podium. Clinton
disregarded Obama's move, and continued to speak -- somehow managing to
talk over Obama while still maintaining his instantly recognizable "aw
shucks" tone of voice. It is at that moment we note the first
clearly visible anger come from Obama. From this point on, Bill
Clinton is completely off script. He is now effectively "running
the show" -- and Obama knows it.

By the 8:20 mark, the White
House Press Corps begins asking Bill Clinton questions while Obama
stands next to the former president, looking increasingly uncomfortable
and agitated. Clinton is likely aware of Obama's condition, quite
possibly having knowingly orchestrated this very scenario just moments
prior. At the 10:28 mark Obama folds his arms across his chest,
staring down the reporter who continues to pose questions to Bill
Clinton. At 10:55 Obama again attempts to retake the podium --
Bill Clinton does not give it up. It is at that point Barack
Obama, current alleged-president of the United States, looks down at his
watch and declares he is 30 minutes late for a Christmas party, and
that, "Gibbs will call last question" (even though Obama has
actually only been at the press conference for about 10 minutes).
A clearly terse handshake Obama between Obama and Clinton is undertaken,
[and a quick grimace-as-smile] followed by Obama's abrupt turn away from
the podium and a short walk to the door.

It is at this moment,
some 11 minutes into the press conference, the situation does indeed
enter into the surreal. Obama is now off camera as another
reporter poses the next question to Bill Clinton while using the title
"Mr. President". For the next 20 minutes, Clinton is speaking to
the nation from the White House, without the use of a teleprompter,
without specific preparation of the questions being posed -- and he hits
it out of the park. Each Clinton response shows an indisputable
depth of knowledge, with an ability to explain that knowledge in terms
easily understood by all. It is the kind of presidential
performance not seen at any time yet during the Obama administration.

I have no opinion as to whether
the "White House Insider" really exists, or not. The reader will
have to decide if these reports are real or not, but the description of
the events in the video is spot-on.

It's easy enough for
conservatives, libertarians, et al, to gloat about Barack Obama's recent
petulant, child-like performances -- at first unable to be even slightly
gracious in compromise with Republicans on the tax bill and then, only a
few days later, fleeing in panic when Clinton acted
the real president, fielding questions with a relaxed authority so
surpassing Obama's it was almost comical.

But there is a bigger
reason not to gloat. We are stuck with this odd duck for another
two years at minimum and now everyone, the entire world really, knows
what he is like. They also know, if they have been paying the
slightest attention, the etiology of his behavior: the man never had to
face serious adversity until he was elected POTUS. And now he
can't deal with it. He's the very model of Harry Truman's famous
advice about getting out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat.
Obama was out of the White House briefing room the second he realized he
was being outclassed by Clinton. And, boy, was he ever!

Roger L. Simon
says we need a leader and don't have one. This is extremely
bad news for our country, especially now.

What is to be done?
Unfortunately, the answer isn't close to simple even with a real leader.
Merely cutting taxes -- assuming we do that -- may not be nearly enough.
And pseudo-stimulus spending, such as has been shamefully added on to
this "compromise bill," will most likely make matters worse.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on our economy, our way of life really.
Interest to China alone will soon be enough to bankrupt us.

The Obama-Stockholm Syndrome

George Neumayr
says that early in the week, the press spoke of Barack Obama's
willingness to extend "an olive branch" to Republicans. By the
middle of the week, his "olive branch" looked more like a thorn bush.

A politician who promised a glorious new era of civility and concord
was referring to his Republican opponents as
hostage-takers on the issue of tax cuts. "It's tempting not to
negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed," he said.
It doesn't occur to him that he qualifies more as the captor in the
analogy. After all, he is the one who was threatening to take
action against the people by raising tax rates on job-creating business
owners.

Obama can only hope that the American people will be
seduced by a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome, a term that
was popularized after Swedish robbers took hostages at a bank in 1973.
During the five-day ordeal, the hostages, instead of resenting their
captors, grew emotionally attached to them and made excuses for them
after it ended.

Obama thinks the American people should feel
gratitude to him for offering to release them from a tax-hike crisis
into which he had thrown them. He casts himself as the passive
negotiator in the struggle, but he is one who has been controlling
Washington for two years.

His stance as a proponent of tax cuts
for the middle class is as plausible as his stance during the healthcare
debate as a champion of the Hyde Amendment. Had Obama been in
Congress during the Reagan era, he would never have voted for
middle-class tax cuts or a ban on government funding of abortion.
But whenever a conservative policy drifts to the middle of a debate, he
acts like he came up with it. He suddenly becomes an "angry"
advocate for a policy he doesn't like but has to take, or appear to
take, out of political necessity.

The Democratic Party counts on
a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome on most issues, for almost
all of the debates in Washington revolve around "saving" the people from
crises Democratic policies exposed them to in the first place. The
way it usually works is that the Democrats create a program the federal
government shouldn't have established at all, the program inevitably
fails, and then they rush in to "reform" it. Obama has talked
about "education reform" in this way, as if his party had nothing to do
with the failed policies and programs under discussion, as if he favors
releasing children from unionized public schools with vouchers in hand.

Obama could put on a smile back in 2008 when he spoke of moving to
"the middle," because he didn't think he would actually have to do so.
But now that political pressures force him to the middle on a few
issues, his smile has turned into a snarl. Real moves to the
middle tax his ego badly. He regards the left's lack of docility
and the right's resistance as a personal affront, and to build himself
back up he has to play the victim and tear America down. "This
country was founded on compromise. I couldn't go through the front
door in this country's founding. And if we were really thinking
about ideal positions, we wouldn't have a union," he spouted bitterly at
Tuesday's press conference.

The media was very impressed by his
"passion." But it was more like pouting that he had to give up yet
another cheap, ill-considered campaign promise. That he knew his
liberal base would be reading his stitched-up lips and hearing "no new
taxes" on job creators made him feel very uncomfortable and defensive.
So while ostensibly rebuking liberals he promised to practice class
warfare at a more opportune time in the coming years.

In his
post-defeat November press conference, he said that the American people
failed to view his socialism as only temporary. But as his promise
of class warfare at a later date shows, it's only his minor suspensions
of socialism that are temporary. It pains him to let the
productive keep their own money, and he expects his spared victims to
feel grateful for not having been mistreated more.

Obama's Not The Man Obots Thought He Was

When viewed with the long lens, the uncivil war
between Obama and progressive-socialist Democrats is merely another
example of the gradual awakening of Obots. The big story of the
last two years is how millions of Americans who voted for him have
concluded he's not the man they thought he was.

Michael Goodwin
says, as a former supporter myself, I know the phenomenon too well.
First you wince as he betrays some principle you thought he shared.

It could be a fiscal issue, ethics or national security. Or
you might have believed, as I did, he was serious about governing mostly
from the middle.

You overlook the breach once, twice, and by the
third time, you face the disappointment. Your eyes and mind now
open, disenchantment comes in waves. As the anger builds, it
finally dawns on you that you were a sucker for your own hopes.

Yet not all suckers are equal, which brings us back to the temper
tantrums of the moment. "Liberals and other brats" describes
what's happening in Nancy Pelosi's haunted House.

It's shocking
to see the open profanity and mockery -- "F- - k Obama" and taunting
chants of "No we can't" -- coming from Dem members of Congress.
But the temptation to sympathize with Obama should be resisted. He
has only himself to blame.

Messiahs either deliver, or they are
abandoned and vilified. Having failed to deliver, Obama is now
paying the price in terms he helped to shape.

Indeed, his
self-reverence and personal attacks on any and all critics mark him as
the brewmeister for much of what is wrong with our politics.
Payback is not just a bitch -- it's fair play.

Obama's grandiose
promises -- "our planet will begin to heal" -- turned the 2008 campaign
into a mutual fantasy society. His [bogus]
life story, race and rhetorical talent made him special, and cult-like
status was conferred on those who "got" his greatness.

The
awakening began the instant he had to govern. For some, it's the
things he couldn't get done -- closing Gitmo, charming Iran, getting out
of Iraq.

For most, the problem is that the things he did haven't
worked. He busted the budget for a stimulus that didn't stimulate,
turned on Israel and other allies for no good reason, and insisted on
the historic health-care fiasco, which will take years to fix.
There are so many ticking time bombs in it that even its authors are
discovering unintended consequences -- and it's only started to take
effect.

The country's response was a no-confidence vote in the
midterms. Yet Obama still doesn't accept the verdict, stumbling
between excuses that belittle voters' concerns.

Worse, he's
declared that class warfare will be his campaign theme for 2012.
He called Republicans "hostage takers" and "bomb throwers," reflections
of an immature and ideological mind that refuses to recognize any
legitimacy in rival views. He would rather campaign on divisions
than govern in tune with the majority consensus.

Obama's not
the man they thought he was because Obama and everybody associated with
his campaign lied to them for two years -- simple as that.

Whatever Happened to Barack Obama?

Bob Leibowitz
says Obama thinks of
himself as an amalgam of the best of presidents past, ascending past
them into his own historic greatness. He may have a soaring
intelligence, though the jury is very much out on that, but the greatest
share of it seems always to be taken up with his own self-awareness,
leaving never quite enough left over for the issues he faces.

Yes, the man can talk. He certainly can talk. He's really
quite good at talking. But talk is about all he's got.

In
his mind, he has the coolness under pressure and the foresight of
Lincoln, while sharing the transformative powers of Wilson in foreign
affairs and FDR in domestic matters.

During the campaign, the
press played to these strengths, treating seriously his views of the
progress he had already created, where under his magic spell the oceans
stopped rising and the earth began to heal.

Even Joe Biden,
widely remarked as the dumbest man ever to score 1600 on the SATs,
commented that Obama represents a previously inexperienced paradigm for
America, a clean and articulate black man.

What more can one ask?

Two years into his presidency -- which is about his single longest
work experience -- in a time of grave threats to the nation, we're
finally acknowledging the reality:

Obama plays more golf than Ike.Obama
suffers more from maladroitness than George H. W. Bush.Obama is
every bit as feckless as Jimmy Carter.He's as personally
ambitious as Richard Nixon ever was.And he parties heartier than
Billy Carter.

Obama is Marie Antoinette masquerading in the role
of president in order to keep the goodies flowing and the flattery of
his/her courtiers in full fever.

He brings Clinton halfway around
the world for 90 minutes of advice on the economy, an area Obama has
bollixed so thoroughly that it will take America decades to dig out, a
crisis he describes as the worst ever faced by any American president.
Then he bails out to a higher priority.

Hey, man, I gotta go. It's party time!

63% Of Americans Say Obama's A Weak Leader

Zogby International says 68% say the nation is
headed in the wrong direction.

Barack Obama's job approval rating
has fallen again to 39%, equaling a low since he took office.
Also, 63% of likely voters say Obama is a weak leader, compared to 19%
who label him strong.

Much of the slippage in Obama's approval
rating from 42% on Dec. 1 was caused by a drop of nine percentage points
among Democrats (82% to 73%). His approval also went down among
independents, from 39% to 36%. Just 7% of Republicans approve.
His approval was also 39% on Nov. 22.

These results are from a
Zogby Interactive poll of 1,914 likely voters conducted from Dec. 8-10,
2010.

Ross Kaminsky
says
that one of his favorite bits of practical advice is "when you find
yourself in a deep hole, stop digging."

The hole that Barack
Obama finds himself in, while largely due to his policy positions, is
also a function of his seeming out of his league, a man-child who was
elected to an office he was unprepared to hold, perhaps the only
candidate for president who made Sarah Palin look like an experienced
and worldly statesman in comparison (and who continues to perform that
remarkable feat today).

Obama is not offering much new in the way
of policy -- fortunately for the nation, still suffering from a
tremendous bout of indigestion over ObamaCare, cap-and-trade (being
implemented by the EPA regardless of lack of congressional action),
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and his failed effort to shutter Guantanamo Bay
(because Muslim radicals in Yemen will hate us so much less if their
Mohammedan brothers are kept in frigid northern Illinois instead of
their current Caribbean resort).

Thus, his biggest ongoing issue
is the reinforcement of the perception among Americans and foreigners
alike that America has its most unpresidential president since at least
Jimmy Carter, and perhaps in its history.

Early in his term, he
seemed aloof, as if he felt above the governing process. Now we
know it's because he's incompetent, if not an outright hindrance, in
that process. He, perhaps the most leftist member of the U.S.
Senate during his time there, can't convince the most leftist House of
Representatives since the FDR Administration to go along with his tax
"deal," the best deal he's going to get given the upcoming change in
majority in the House and lessening of the Democrat majority in the
Senate.

So, in order to try to sway House Democrats who were in
revolt to the extent of some yelling "f**k Obama" during a House
Democratic Caucus meeting about the "deal," Obama felt the need to meet
with and then display the peacock president, i.e. the president most
interested in displaying himself, Bill Clinton.

It was a sharp
contrast to the recent book-promoting TV appearances by George W. Bush.
Bush is routinely asked why he's been all but invisible in public
discussion of government policy and his answer is consistently (and I'm
paraphrasing now) that he thinks ex-presidents should focus on the "ex"
part and leave governing to the current office holder. Meddling by
ex-presidents seems to be a tendency of Democrats (just another symptom
of the Progressive holier-and-smarter-than-thou mindset), whether
Clinton or Carter, whereas both Bushes and even Reagan and Ford led
distinctly private post-presidency lives, or at least refrained from
acting like some sort of public senior adviser to the president. George
W. Bush has said repeatedly that he basically never asked his father for
serious policy advice -- and implied that his father wouldn't have
wanted to be asked.

So now we have Barack "Peter Principle" Obama
walking up to a hastily-called press conference with Bill Clinton who is
probably thinking that Hillary might have an opening to run in 2012
despite all her protestations and who is therefore glad to do anything
that boosts the Clinton name while damaging Obama at Obama's remarkably
naive invitation.

It would have been bad enough for Obama's
stature to have a joint press conference with Bill Clinton -- the same
guy who urged the House to pass ObamaCare because not passing it would
mean Democrat losses in the election (doh!) -- but Obama actually ceded
the stage to Clinton, like a low-level flunkie introducing the boss,
like an emcee introducing the keynote speaker. Clinton preened and
displayed for the better part of half an hour, showing the press corps
and all the world the communications skills that Obama, for all his
early vaunted talents as an orator, is distinctly and damagingly
missing, at least when he is sans-teleprompter.

And it would have
been bad enough if Obama ceded the stage to Clinton but stayed in the
room and answered questions at the end. But instead, he said "I've
been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I'm going
to take off..." to which Bill offered the helpful response "I don't want
to make her mad, please go." We can all be our own screenwriters
of the tragicomic lines representing what he was really thinking...

So, let's get this straight, Mr. Obama: The fate of a tax measure
that is of critical import for an economy with a near 10% unemployment
rate, a measure that will impact directly or indirectly a 9-digit number
of Americans, and a measure with political ramifications potentially as
large as ObamaCare's is to be left in the hands of an ex-president (did
I mention "ex"?) because your wife is waiting?

The political
naÔvetť of Barack Obama is becoming, even more than his far-left agenda,
his political Achilles' heel. Given what Barack Obama believes in
and hopes to achieve, perhaps America is Troy to Obama's Achilles.
He was the strongest warrior the "transformers" of America could send
our way, but even he was vulnerable -- even to the point of destruction
-- in an area that few would have considered the most likely to be
attacked on their particular fields of battle.

Obama's weakness
is America's gain, though perhaps not as much as it is Bill Clinton's
gain.

Obama's Ego Keeps Getting In The Way

Rick Moran
says a trenchant piece of analysis in WaPo by Michael Gerson this
morning regarding Obama's monumental ego where even a slam dunk like
extending the Bush tax rates is botched.

Gerson echoes what many
on the right have been saying about Obama for years; it doesn't matter
what the issue is, it's all about him:

It is Obama's favorite rhetorical pose: the
hectorer in chief. He is alternately defiant, defensive,
exasperated, resentful, harsh, scolding, prickly. He is both
the smartest kid in class and the schoolyard bully.

There
are many problems with this mode of communication, but mainly its
supreme self-regard. The tax deal, in Obama's presentation,
was not about the economy or the country. It was about him.
It was about the absurd concessions he was forced to make, the
absurd opposition he was forced to endure, the universally
insufficient deference to his wisdom.

The administration
further complicated its communications task by presenting Obama as
ideologically superior to his own agreement. The upper-income
tax rates and the estate tax provisions, in David Axelrod's
description, are "odious." As a rule, staffers should not use
such a word to describe policies that Obama has agreed to accept.
It makes him look compromised and weak. Instead of a leader
brokering a popular agreement, Obama appears to be a politician
forced under threat to violate his deepest convictions.

At
this point in Obama's occupation of the Oval Office, even Democrats
must be asking: Is he really this bad at politics? The list of
miscalculations grows longer. To pass the stimulus package,
the administration predicts 8 percent unemployment -- a prediction
that became an indictment. It pledges the closing of the
Guantanamo Bay prison -- without a realistic plan to do so. It
sends Obama to secure the Chicago Olympics -- and comes away
empty-handed. It announces a "summer of recovery" -- which
becomes a source of ridicule. It unveils a Manhattan trial for
Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- which nearly every New York official
promptly turns against. Press secretary Robert Gibbs picks
fights with both conservative talk radio hosts and the "professional
left" -- which uniformly backfire. Obama seems to endorse the
Ground Zero mosque -- before retreating 24 hours later. He
suggests that Republicans are "enemies" of Latinos -- apparently
unable to distinguish between hardball and trash talk.

Once you start a list, and the evidence is right
before your eyes, it is truly shocking to realize how much of an
incompetent politician Obama really is. Forget his missteps as a
statesman or as an executive. This aspect of Obama's failure is
much more damning because it is directly linked to his ability to get
things done.

And in that department, he is found wanting.

Is Jarrett Running The White House?

Ulsterman has another communication from Deep
Throat II. The entire article is
here. The following is an excerpt:

LOL! I donít
have enough time in the day to give you all my thoughts on that!
As I told you earlier, Clinton was very happy following that press
conference. It sent some serious rumbles through the party
structure. And here is what is being under reported. It
wasnít so much how good Clinton was but how bad Obama was. Bill
Clinton was being Bill Clinton, and nobody does that kind of thing
better than he does. But seeing Obama leave that stage for a Xmas
party?????? That was just crazy stuff wasnít it? If Obama
didnít still somehow enjoy having most the media working to protect him
that kind of thing might have just finished him right there. And
you were right when you asked about how he treated Robert Gibbs.
To be that dismissive of your Press Sec. to dismiss him as "Gibbs" to
the press. Wow! Thereís so much to read between the lines on
what Obama showed us that day, and none of it is good for Obama.
Iíve been saying it to you for a while now. The guy is cracking
up. Nobody who watches that press conference can believe
otherwise. It wasnít just bad. It was HORRIBLE. How
many times has he said that turning the economy around is important?
Jobs are critical? Etc???? And so he meets with a former
Pres. to talk tax rates that impact every American and leaves the press
conference regarding that meeting after a few minutes??????? I
actually felt bad for Gibbs, and that is saying something for me.
The damage control for that mess must have been off the charts.
Gibbs is gone soon though. Taken longer than I had thought.
Jarrett wants him gone.
She has effectively taken over WH at this point. AND she is behind
much of the anti-Rahm movement in Chicago. Her hands are all over
it. Bitch.

I want to point you on something about Jarrett
if you donít mind. She was at a recent WH/business leader thing.
She WAS the White House at this meeting. Obama was there but said
little after the intros. Jarrett spoke almost all the policy and
the push for organized labor was HUGE by her at this meeting. The
WH needs business to help out if they are to get a 2nd term. They
have to admit that now. So what is going on is simple bribery.
We are talking billions and billions here to come via the health bill
requirements and tax code and other "perks." It was a strong arm
attempt that appeared almost fully coordinated by Jarrett. I donít
believe Obama even understands the process here. He is being told
what to say, how to react, etc. Thatís not new, but on this itís
even more so than before. Jarrett is running the show, with input
from First Lady. Those two have formed quite a formidable team
inside WH. Anyway, what I want to tell you specifically on this
meeting was that after it finished up, Jarrett came out to speak with
media. CNBC I believe. She gives a rundown on meeting as the
"President said this. President said that." Making it appear
Obama was up to speed on every question posed to her by CNBC. IT
WAS ALL A LIE. Obama hardly spoke at that meeting. As I
said, Jarrett did almost all the talking for the WH. And regarding
those specific questions being asked to Jarrett -- some of them NEVER
CAME UP IN THE MEETING. She was LYING over and over again during
that brief interview. And she was taking some of her own responses
in the meeting and then saying "The president said this." Obama
didnít say any of that. Jarrett basically admitted on camera she
is the president. The two are one and the same. Jarrett is
Obamaís brain. Itís her WH now full on. There is nobody left
in the West Wing to counter her agenda. And her agenda is almost
100% labor unions. Not the kind of support Iím familiar with and
have worked with. Something else. Something far bigger.
Watch that. There is something going on there. Unions are
blasting Rahm in Chicago. Those strings lead right back to
Jarrett.

snip . . .

Holder is very nervous.
Something up at DOJ. The place is a mess. Normally he would
have been long gone but Jarrett supports him. Only as long as
Holder can keep a lid on the stink of what is at the DOJ though IMO.
If some of that breaks open Holder is gone and could even face full on
hearings against HIM. Those would be deserved IMO.

Once again, you're going to have to
decide if this is a hoax, or if the White House Insider is real and/or
truthful.

A Vast Domestic Snooping Machine

The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama
administration is creating a vast domestic spying network to collect
information about Americans in the wake of the September 11, 2001
attacks and subsequent terror plots. The system collects, stores
and analyzes information about thousands of US citizens and residents,
many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing

The
administration is using for this purpose the FBI, local police, state
homeland security offices and military criminal investigators, the daily
added.

The administration's goal is to have every state and local
law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to
buttress the work of the FBI, noted the paper, which has conducted its
own investigation of the matter.

According to the report, the
network includes 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with
its own counter-terrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At
least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001
attacks.

The probe has revealed that technologies and techniques
developed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have
migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in the United
States, the paper pointed out.

In addition, the FBI is building
a database with the names and personal information of thousands of US
citizens and residents, and the database is accessible to an
increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal
investigators, the report noted.

The cost of the network is
difficult to measure, but the Department of Homeland Security has given
31 billion dollars in grants since 2003 to state and local governments
for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect
against terrorists. Only this year, it gave 3.8 billion dollars to
local law enforcement agencies.

If the Obama administration is
behind it, I would describe the initiative as "half-vast."